The widespread use of anti-personnel land mines by nations such as India and Pakistan is hampering efforts to eliminate a weapon that kills or maims thousands of people every year
By now, subscription-free Internet service has pretty much proven itself an unprofitable anachronism. Except in Egypt. In this nation beset by creaky Net connections and outdated circuits, where computers remain a luxury for the vast majority, a free Internet strategy is boosting Internet access
Colin Powell has said the United States must publish its evidence against Saddam Hussein before it launches any military action against Iraq
While delegates attending the World Summit wrangled over how best to save the planet’s rapidly dwindling resources, they gave scant indication of leading by example. The 10-day summit, billed as the largest UN conference ever held, is expected to generate between 300 and 400 tons of garbage, and so far, just 20% of it is being recycled
Veteran UK ex-minister Gerald Kaufman warns of substantial resistance
at Westminster if Mr Blair follows the most intellectually backward American president of my lifetime
into the looming conflict
Conservative Iranian newspaper, Afarinesh, recently reported that two government agencies, which were not identified, had proposed legalising brothels, under the name of chastity houses
, as a way of bringing prostitution under control
Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, has caused outrage in Israel and angered sections of the British Jewish community by making veiled criticism of the Sharon government’s policies towards the Palestinians
Environmentalists denounced a proposal to bridge a North-South rift on the eve of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg on the weekend as a sell-out to rich nations seeking freer trade and corporate globalisation. While South African police guarding the Earth Summit on the weekend accused demonstrators of involving children in a banned street protest that stole attention from talks on the future of the planet
Haxjere Sahiti was married on a Sunday, murdered on a Monday, and buried in the woods the same afternoon. Married life lasted less than 12 hours for her. It ended with the 20-year-old Kosovar Albanian woman lying dead on her family’s living room carpet, with seven pistol bullets fired into her torso
Hundreds of girls as young as 12 are being raped or forcibly kept as concubines in rural Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe’s youth militia as part of a campaign that human-rights lawyers have branded systematic political cleansing
of the population
The UK’s take on the European DMCA
— the European Copyright Directive — will make criminals out of ordinary computer users, according to a new critique by the UK Campaign for Digital Rights. And it will also fail to protect researchers, says Julian Midgley who penned the report
The Chinese effort to build a home-grown Win98 is called Yangfan Linux, which means raise the sail
in Chinese, the open source operating system is being pieced together by the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Centre, a group established by the government to organise Linux development in China
After more than a decade of trying, Australian researchers have created a highly infectious virus that could wipe out the country’s rabbit pests by making them sterile
Fortnum & Mason in London’s Piccadilly — one of London’s most prestigious addresses — is looking for a chocolate buyer to travel the world, taste as much chocolate as possible and select only the best for its discerning customers
Afraid that Peru may adopt a bill decreeing the use of open-source software in all government systems, Microsoft apparently enlisted the American ambassador in Lima to help try and convince the Peruvians to kill the legislation
The Federal Government is under fire for its decision to vote against a new United Nations protocol against torture. The protocol calls for independent visits to prisons as a way of halting torture. Australia was one of eight countries to vote against the protocol, while the United States abstained, having earlier expressed its opposition to the protocol
Saddam Hussein blames western sanctions for the dying children of Iraq. But the only Iraqis who can speak openly — those in the safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan — blame Baghdad. But can the Father of the Iraqi nation really be sacrificing his children?
China is set to develop a Windows clone equivalent to Win 98, with full compatibility with Office 2000 and Word. Apparently, 18 companies and universities have been working on the two initiatives, with a 1.0 version supposedly already released to certain government offices
The Simputer is a handheld computer running GNU/Linux starting at around $214 and is aiming to be an affordable computer for the third world that can be used even by the illiterate with its text-to-speech features, it will roll out next month
A blunt new report by Arab intellectuals commissioned by the United Nations, the Arab Human Development Report 2002, warns that Arab societies are being crippled by a lack of political freedom, the repression of women and an isolation from the world of ideas that stifles creativity
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