In a stinging critique of the British government’s Commission for Africa initiative, the NGO Action Aid cautions Prime Minister Tony Blair that the first step in supporting Africa’s development "must be to do it no harm". The NGO acknowledges Blair’s "good intentions", but derides United Kingdom policy and practice. Africa’s problems have constituted complex barriers to development that it cannot tackle alone.
Wealthy nations must “fulfil their pledges” to increase aid to developing countries to meet the United Nations millennium development goals – including curbing the spread of HIV – within the next decade, according to a report Investing in Development. The report will be presented to the Group of Eight industrialised nations at its meeting in July and to the UN General Assembly in September.
Uganda is adopting sexual abstinence-only programmes financed by the United States that could undo its successes. Human Rights Watch warns that the new policies, which promote abstinence until marriage rather than condom use, leave not only young unmarried people but also women married to unfaithful men without the knowledge they need to protect themselves from infection.
The development economist Guy Mhone, a Wits professor of public and development management, passed away at a Pretoria hospital on Tuesday, at the age of 62. Born in Luanshya, Zambia, and raised along the border with Malawi (the country of his citizenship), Mhone resisted colonial Central African Federation repression and then the brutality of the Banda era.
China must restrict its textile exports to avoid destabilising world trade with a flood of cheap goods, the European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, warned last week. Speaking in China for the first time since taking on the European Union trade portfolio, Mandelson said many developing nations were unwilling to enter a new round of negotiations because they feared China would seize the lion’s share of benefits.
With demonstrators shouting religious slogans outside, United States Supreme Court justices this week argued and fretted over whether the Ten Commandments displayed on government property cross the line between church and state. Arguments in cases from Texas and Kentucky were the court’s first consideration of the issue since 1980, when justices ruled that they could not be displayed in public schools.
Three years after sanctions against ”conflict diamonds” helped end Angola’s civil war, the country’s diamond industry continues to thrive on violence and corruption, according to a report to be released next week by Angolan human-rights activists. Angola’s Deadly Diamonds details incidents of murder, beating, detention without trial, extortion and rape attributed to the Angolan police.
A new strain of HIV – resistant to three of the four classes of anti-retroviral drugs available – has been identified in New York, according to city health officials. Of particular concern was the rapidity at which the strain progressed to Aids in the infected individual.
In their complex and protracted mediation efforts in Africa, South African negotiators have long since learned not to believe everything they read on the news pages. But they dare not ignore the finance pages. So when the New Forces rebel movement in Côte d’Ivoire reportedly pronounced the mediation efforts dead and buried this week, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad remained sanguine.
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