Insurgents in Iraq intent on derailing elections due in less than two weeks stepped up a campaign of violence across the country on Monday, claiming dozens more lives in shootings and car bombings. A campaign of assassinations has claimed victims from north to south Iraq.

More than 500-million people can escape poverty and tens of millions can avoid otherwise certain death if the United States, Japan and other rich nations keep their promises to vastly increase development aid over the next decade, a report said on Monday.

The president of Harvard University has provoked a furore by arguing that men outperform women in maths and sciences because of biological difference, and discrimination is no longer a career barrier for female academics. Lawrence Summers, a career economist who served as treasury secretary under former United States president Bill Clinton, has a reputation for outspokenness.

The Department of Health on Monday urged the public to report pharmacists not abiding by the maximum R26 dispensing fee rule for medication. The government insists this is the legal maximum that pharmacists may charge. ”We urge South Africans to refuse to be subjected to this exploitation,” the department said.

From a case of child prostitution in the White House and secret military experiments at the Montauk United States air force base — including time travel and mind control — to an unidentified flying object being spotted in an official Nasa picture from Mars, Ian Fraser uncovers all this and a whole lot more.

The virtually unanimous support for our Constitution would suggest that we should experience minimum controversy with regard to the national programmes needed to effect the political, economic, social and other changes visualised in it.
Experience, however, tells us that even the mere interpretation of the objectives is itself a subject of political and ideological struggle, writes President Thabo Mbeki.