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Salute the woman

Ann E. Dunwoody is the first woman to reach the U.S. army’s highest rank. She has been promoted to four-star general. In her acceptance speech, she said she had never expected to rise so high in the ranks in her 33-year career. She said no one was more surprised than she and her husband. “Behind every successful woman there’s an astonished man,” she added. She is now head of the Army Materiel Command, in charge of weapons, equipment and uniforms for the army. Women are barred from combat roles but have been allowed in the last two decades to serve in a wide variety of other positions. There are 21 female generals, most of them one-star, in the U.S. army. Women make up 14 per cent of the army’s active-service strength of more than 5,00,000 soldiers.

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Serena’s serve

International tennis player Serena Williams cut the ribbon at the Serena Williams Secondary School in Matooni, Kenya, and opened the school which is located 160 km east of Nairobi. She helped fund the institute. Built through a partnership between the Build African Schools initiative and Hewlett Packard, the school is designed to empower African students through education. Dickson Mutaiti, the Director of Projects at Build African Schools in Kenya, said, “We are indeed honoured to have Ms. Williams visit Kenya at this momentous time in American history when we have a new President elect who has roots in Kenya. The secondary school put up in her name will give chance to needy primary school students who want to pursue secondary school education.”

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No year-end parties

The Croatian government has banned Christmas and New Year parties in the public sector because of the global financial crisis. State-run firms and organisations have also been told that they won’t be allowed to dip into their funds to buy Christmas presents. The ban follows a proposal to freeze public-sector salaries next year. Prime Minister Ivo Sanader said there was no need for panic, but the country had to be serious. For that goal we forbid the buying of Christmas and New Year’s gifts as well as organising of Christmas and New Year’s receptions,” said Sanader. “I believe that with the proposed measures, we can avoid a deeper crisis within the next year,” he added.

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Nine more in the fray

Delhi has a woman chief minister for the past ten years but it seems women in New Delhi constituency are not impressed by that, with nine women deciding to contest against Sheila Dikshit. None of them seem to stand a chance to win against the Congress mascot, but they want to take this election as an opportunity to express their “displeasure” against Dikshit’s policies on development and women. The women aspirants allege that the Chief Minister failed to address the issues of women and are particularly angry at her “adventurous” comment regarding the murder of Soumya Viswanathan, a news producer of a TV channel here. Five of the nine candidates opposing Dikshit are party candidates, while four are Independents.

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Journalists survive attack

Unidentified gunmen shot and wounded two foreign journalists in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar. One of the men is Afghan, the other Japanese. Reports say the Afghan man works for the U.S. magazine Newsweek. The Afghan journalist has been indentified as Sami Yousufzai, while the Japanese is a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Yousufzai is said to have been seriously wounded but reports say he is expected to survive the attack. The Japanese journalist received only slight injuries. The two men were attacked by gunmen in a car in the Hayatabad suburb of the city, close to the tribal region of Khyber.

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Eta chief nabbed

The suspected military chief of the Basque separatist group, Eta, has been arrested in southern France. Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, alias “Txeroki”, was arrested in the Pyrenees. He was suspected of the murder of two Spanish civil guard officers in the French town of Capbreton in 2007. Eta is blamed for the deaths of more than 820 people in its 40-year campaign for an independent Basque nation. The group resumed its campaign of violence in June 2007, following the failure of secret dialogue with the Spanish government.

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Moon mission successful

India became the fifth nation in the world to have sent an unmanned mission, Chandrayaan, on moon. It was a significant feat because India’s moonshot was successful in the very first attempt something that even major space powers like the U.S. and Russia could not achieve. The man who launched the Indian moon mission, Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, said, “It’s undoubtedly a great moment for India because nearly 50 per cent of the moon missions of other countries have not been successful.”This is the first time that an Indian-built spacecraft has broken away from the earth’s gravitational field and reached the moon. Scientists said after the Pokhran nuclear tests in May 1998, the moon mission was the greatest scientific accomplishment for India.

Compiled by SUBAJAYANTHI

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