Sub-Saharan Africa is poised to record growth of 5,8% in 2006, its best performance in more than 30 years, as higher commodity prices, stronger agricultural output and economic reforms start to pay dividends, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Wednesday.
The United States has made no deal with Somalia to run anti-piracy patrols off its coast, a US official said on Tuesday, denying claims by the East African country’s prime minister. ”There is no such deal as alleged,” said the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”We haven’t made any arrangement to patrol those waters.”
Mass protests demanding legalisation of undocumented migrants has bolstered United States Latinos, but it is too early to know if they can muster voters in upcoming elections. The giant pro-immigrant rallies across the United States have been led by members of the 40-million strong Hispanic community, the country’s largest ethnic minority.
The United States wants to settle the Iran nuclear crisis through diplomacy, President George Bush said on Monday, describing reports of plans to attack Iran as ”wild speculation”. While the White House is still warning Iran about its uranium enrichment, the administration went out of its way on Monday to play down reports of planning for military strikes.
The United States administration backs sending up to several hundred Nato advisers to support African Union peacekeepers protect villagers in Sudan’s Darfur region, The Washington Post reported. The newspaper said the move would include some US troops and mark a significant expansion of US and allied involvement in the conflict.
Tens of thousands of people marched through Dallas on Sunday to demand that legislators pass a law to help the estimated 11,5-million illegal workers in the United States. Many Hispanic families with small children joined the protest, part of a renewed campaign to counter efforts by conservatives in the US Congress to make illegal entry a crime.
Internet telephony is giving traditional phone service a run for its money, and is expected to be used by 32,6-million United States householdsb in 2010, a new survey suggests. The survey released this week by eMarketer suggests that VoIP, or voice over internet protocol, is luring customers with low prices but that this is just one component in a -billion market for residential voice and data services.
A cockpit recording from a plane hijacked on September 11 will be played in public for the first time at a trial to decide whether Zacarias Moussaoui should be executed. Judge Leonie Brinkema agreed to a prosecution request to play the tape from United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after a passenger uprising against the hijackers.
A jury has ordered pharma giant Merck to pay ,5-million to a man claiming that the pain medication Vioxx had caused his heart attack, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. A New Jersey jury on Wednesday delivered a split decision in the cases of two men who said they had suffered heart attacks after taking Merck’s Vioxx.
While political pressure is building on United States President George Bush to do more to stop what he calls ”genocide” in Darfur, recent events suggest that the National Islamic Front government of Sudan is not particularly concerned. One sign of the regime’s confidence was its decision to block the scheduled visit this week to Darfur by the United Nation’s chief aid official, Jan Egeland.
Tom DeLay rose from humble beginnings as the owner of a Texas pest control business to become known as ”The Hammer” — one of the most successful and feared politicians in the United States. DeLay rose to become the Republican leader in the House of Representatives and a key powerbroker in any decision in the US Congress, until a Texas prosecutor threw a spanner into the political works.
The famous Winchester rifle glorified in American Westerns may have fired its last shot as a plant where it had been manufactured since 1866 closed its doors last week. One hundred eighty-six employees of the United States Repeating Arms Company plant located in New Haven, Connecticut, were thanked for their work on Friday, two days after the facility stopped all manufacturing activity.
China’s pandas and Madagascar’s lemurs have found unexpected new allies in a handful of mining companies and oil firms. Though natural-resource-consuming big businesses may seem unlikely champions of environmental conservation, a few are actually in the vanguard of a programme protecting forests and endangered species in Asia, Africa and around the world.
Oil prices appear headed back toward a barrel, a level not seen since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, and sporadic shortages have raised gasoline prices in the United States — but the US economy seems capable of absorbing uncomfortably high prices.
The United States has offered aid to Iran after a devastating earthquake but also kept up pressure over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme. The powerful earthquake struck western Iran, leaving at least 70 dead and 1 265 injured. The area of Brujerd was hit hardest.
The United States military plans to detonate a 700-tonne explosive charge in a test called ”Divine Strake” that could send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas. ”I don’t want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons,” said James Tegnelia, head of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency.
Growth in the use of the internet has come off its sizzling pace, even as people become more dependent on cyberspace for work and leisure, a global survey showed on Wednesday. Ipsos Insight’s Face of the Web study showed the global online population grew just 5% last year, well behind 2004’s 20% growth rate.
Paralysed rats who received transplants of adult mouse brain stem cells were able to partially restore limb movement, researchers said in Wednesday’s issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Called neuronal precursors, the stem cells from the brains of adult mice are able to transform themselves into cells of the central nervous system and other tissues.
Most adolescents in the United States are sleep deprived, jeopardising their mental, emotional and physical growth and damaging their performance in the classrom, said a study published on Tuesday. The problem could even be fatal, as adolescents learn to drive often without enough sleep, the study said.
White House chief of staff Andrew Card has resigned and will be replaced by budget chief Joshua Bolten, President George Bush said Tuesday. Bush has come under intense pressure in recent weeks, including from within his own Republican Party, to shake up his White House staff amid a sharp slump in his personal-approval ratings.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) on Monday revived a project to send a probe to explore two of the solar system’s biggest asteroids, nearly four weeks after the Dawn mission had been cancelled due to cost overruns and technical glitches. The probe would travel to the huge Vesta and Ceres asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
The United States has called on Nigeria deliver former Liberian leader Charles Taylor to a United Nations tribunal in Sierra Leone for trial on charges of crimes against humanity. With prospects clouded for Taylor’s prosecution for atrocities in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said, ”He needs to be brought to justice.”
Conservatives who charge President George Bush has imposed a theocracy, risked United States bankruptcy and fanned flames of anti-Americanism are flooding US booksellers with their irate tomes. Leading the list of bestsellers is commentator Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st century.
Space tourism has caught the imagination of United States business leaders, some of whom already have plans to serve what they say may be a multibillion-dollar industry in a couple of decades. ”Space tourism will be a significant portion of the overall travel and tourism industry over the next 20 to 25 years,” said Eric Anderson, chief executive of Space Adventures.
Treating mothers for depression can mean long-term happiness for their children, according to a study published on Tuesday. Depression is known to be passed on genetically, but it can also be affected by the environment in which a child is raised, according to authors of an article published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, on a red-carpet visit to the United States, called on Tuesday for exiled former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor to be extradited home swiftly. ”I wish we had the luxury of time on this issue. But it has become an impediment to our being able to move forward to be able to pursue our development agenda,” she said after talks with United States President George Bush.
Liberia’s new leader, the first woman elected president of an African country, on Wednesday urged American lawmakers to help her make Liberia ”America’s success story in Africa”. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf compared Liberia’s devastation from two decades of warfare to that done by the December 2004 tsunami in Asia.
President George Bush’s place in history — standard-bearer or war-mongerer — is perhaps being decided at this moment in Iraq, three years after the United States-led invasion. Bush recognised the gravity of the current situation in Iraq by saying that Iraqis were at ”a moment of choosing.” But in the end they had turned away from ”the abyss” of civil war, he said.
A record amount of spending in February pushed the United States government’s Budget deficit to the highest level to date for a single month, the Treasury Department reported on Friday. The government had a record monthly deficit of ,2-billion in February.
Columnist and humorist Art Buchwald says he’s having ”the best time of my life” after deciding to refuse dialysis treatment and stay in a hospice. ”So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn’t Die,” Buchwald (80) wrote in a column published in newspapers on Tuesday.
Cigarette sales hit a 55-year low in 2005 and have fallen by more than 21% since state attorneys general negotiated a landmark settlement with the industry eight years ago. The National Association of Attorneys General said on Wednesday that the 378-billion cigarettes sold in the United States last year marked the lowest number sold since 1951.
The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday said it would keep in place sanctions on Zimbabwe because of money still owed the bank, and urged Harare to urgently implment reforms to stablise its economy. In a statement the IMF board urged Harare ”to continue its efforts to resolve the remaining overdue financial obligations”.