It is not quite a monastic life, but as Jean-Bertrand Aristide waits in South Africa for the call to go home, his background has come to the fore. "I was a priest, which means I could stay in one place for months without feeling the same thing someone else would feel. Staying in one place is not a problem for me." The deposed Haitian president says Africa must continue in its role as custodian of democratic values.
It helps to be an optimist if you are Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, but Gideon Gono is perhaps reading too much into his early successes. Gono acknowledged that the economy had been through a rough patch in the past years, but added, "In the same breath I can attest to the world that the Zimbabwean economy is now on the mend. We have bottomed out and it’s definitely looking up."
Teenage pregnancy has often dealt a mortal blow to the educational aspirations of girls in Africa. But, laws compelling schools to re-admit these young mothers could hold the key to solving this problem. At present, just a handful of countries in Africa have instituted laws that make it compulsory for schools to re-admit young mothers.
Up to 30 000 Iraqi police officers are to be sacked for being incompetent and unreliable and will be given a -million payoff before the United States hands over to an Iraqi government, say senior British military sources. Many officers either deserted to the insurgents or simply stayed at home during the recent uprisings in Falluja and across the south.
Arms-exporting governments are reneging on their promises by failing to take into account the impact that the trade has on poverty, Oxfam says in a report published this week. The report, Guns or Growth, says six developing countries — Oman, Syria, Burma, Pakistan, Eritrea and Burundi — spend more on arms than they do on health and education combined.
Hardly a day goes by in which we do not hear of a government minister somewhere resigning his or her office. But why do ministers resign? More interestingly — why do some not resign although there seem to be compelling reasons for them to do so? In the absence of empirical research, generalisations must be guesswork. Ministers frequently resign because they find themselves involved in scandals.
It was a night Portugal will long remember. In the most heartstopping game of Euro 2004 so far, the host nation beat England 6-5 in a penalty shootout on Thursday after a 2-2 tie in regulation time, becoming the tournament’s first semifinalist and triggering wild celebrations across the country.
It’s only two years since South Africa last played Wales but it seems like a lifetime. Then, as now, the Springboks played the first two games of the season in Bloemfontein and Cape Town and, perhaps more pertinently, they were also looking ahead to a brave new world under a new coach.
Auf Wiedersehen. Arrivederci. Ciao. Yes, it’s good night from our friends in Germany, Italy and Spain, three of the world’s established footballing powers.
This sad trio, all ranked in Fifa’s top 10, are going home. The Czech fans were singing Auf Wiedersehen long before Milan Baros scored the winner at the Jose Alvalada Stadium in Lisbon on Wednesday night.
South African soldiers attached to the United Nations peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are among the 3 700 troops now deployed on that country’s tense eastern border. More than 20 000 DRC troops have massed on the eastern border with Rwanda, say UN officials.