Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Sunday urged churches to help state efforts to revive the country’s ruined economy but warned that priests who dabbled in politics could face a ”vicious” backlash. ”We cannot do without each other as the church and the state,” Mugabe told thousands who gathered at a stadium outside the capital Harare to pray for an end to Zimbabwe’s deepening economic and political crises.
Activists familiar with street protests outside the venues of annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are in for a different treat at this year’s gathering. Singapore, the host country of the mid-September event, is sparing little to ensure that its penchant for thought control will be evident.
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African rivals have shown their support for Ghana’s World Cup squad, with visits from star players and letters of support encouraging the Black Stars ahead of a second-round match with mighty Brazil. ”The other African teams were eliminated. Now we represent Ghana and Africa,” said captain Stephen Appiah.
The city of Washington will this week launch an unprecedented campaign to test every resident aged between 14 and 84 for the HI virus. The initiative, believed to be the most comprehensive in the history of the Aids epidemic, is part of a plan to make HIV testing as routine as getting a blood-pressure check in the city that has America’s worst rate of new infections.
Israel has warned Hamas that it will pay a ”deadly price” for a daring raid on Israeli positions on Sunday in which militants killed two soldiers and kidnapped a third. Members of Hamas played a leading role in the pre-dawn attack, in which gunmen took Israeli forces by surprise and raised the prospect of a major escalation of violence.
After being smacked around since May 11 in equity, bonds and commodities in both the developed and emerging world, it is hard for investors to keep focused on the fundamentals. Globally, investors — not least of all our own Reserve Bank — have begun to fear that this may be the beginning of another 1998-style emerging market crisis. But this is not 1998.
Ungoverned and ungovernable since 1991, Somalia is once again receiving the kind of attention it was burdened with a decade ago, when international peacekeepers tried unsuccessfully to bring order to the chaos-torn country. The United States and the Arab League have redoubled their efforts to create a dialogue between the transitional government of Abdullahi Yusuf and the Islamic Courts.
The biggest black economic empowerment deal of the year may not even be a deal. And it may not even be that big in monetary terms. Yet its implications are huge. In February, IBM announced it would add 900 jobs to the 500 it already has at its South African call centre.
NGOs played a key role in fighting South Africa’s apartheid system of government, and have remained vocal during the first decade of democracy in the country. But, civil society activists now caution that this benign state of affairs should not be taken at face value. Funding remains a contentious issue, for instance.
While the international community has invested Sierra Leone’s recovery in trials and tribunals, Sierra Leoneans themselves have relied on family and sheer inner will to rebuild lives devastated by the country’s civil war. The award-winning documentary <i>The Refugee All Stars</i> captures this resilience of the human spirit in a Guinean refugee camp.