More than 180 000 people have died from hunger and disease during the last 18 months of the Darfur conflict, the United Nations said on Tuesday, as negotiations continued at its New York headquarters to break the deadlock on a new security council resolution to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government.
The United States plans to wreck a British initiative to commit the G8 states to combatting illegal logging in the world’s threatened rainforests, a leaked memorandum revealed on Tuesday night. The British initiative was prompted by Indonesia, which said corruption there was so rampant that the authorities did not have the power to tackle the supply of timber by criminal gangs
India’s film capital was at the centre of a sex scandal on Tuesday after one of Bollywood’s favourite villains was filmed apparently offering a woman help with her acting career in return for sex. Shakti Kapoor, whose menacing grimace has filled many a Bollywood billboard, denied any wrongdoing and accused a TV network of framing him.
"The polarisation we see within the international community … replicates the polarisation within the country itself … the lack of consensus on the Zimbabwean question has been a major stumbling block." — Zimbabwe political analyst Eldred Masunugure, in the <i>Financial Gazette</i>. Compare this report with others from Zimbawe’s media.
Many local net users still don’t get the idea that the internet is a big, free supermarket of goodies. Naturally, local business is hoping that this simple fact isn’t found out, and that people will continue handing over large amounts of money for things they can find and download for free, if they take the time to look. Here’s a guide on how to get hold of anything and everything — but were too afraid to ask …
"British Prime Minister Tony Blair has declared that the two issues at the centre of the G8 Summit this July will be African poverty and global climate change. These may seem to be distinct issues. In fact, they are linked. A trip I took to a village in the Tigre region in northern Ethiopia shows why," writes Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Amid a government campaign to persuade the nation’s children and their parents that they must stay fit and slim, a new British study shows that girls as young as five are unhappy with their bodies and want to be thinner. According to a recent study of girls aged between five and eight, nearly half (46,9%) wanted to be thinner. Just 11 of these girls (14%) were actually overweight.
Personally speaking, being rebranded from half-caste to mixed race came as welcome relief. Yet, try as we might to change our image, we tragic ”mulatresses” remain as doggedly woeful as the salivating madwoman in Mr Rochester’s attic.
Confused, miserable and in perpetual limbo, we are now apparently abundant in the world of celebrity.
When Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour rolled into this dusty village and bellowed ”How many people want a bed net?”, hundreds of hands shot up into the air. Amid the din of drums and the cries of excitement, Jeffrey Sachs, a special adviser to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan who was also on the scene, said: ”I want Guereo to be the first village in Africa where everyone sleeps under bed nets.”
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