The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Moscow - A senior Russian military official voiced strong concern Wednesday about U.S. plans to develop low-yield nuclear weapons, saying that Moscow might be forced to review its own nuclear doctrine. Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of staff of the Russian General Staff, told reporters that the Pentagon's plans to develop such weapons would be destabilizing. "We are witnessing that nuclear weapons, which have served as a political deterrent, are being transformed into a battlefield instrument," Baluyevsky said. "It's very scary, extremely scary." Johannesburg - AIDS has already orphaned more than 11 million African children under the age of 15 - and "the worst is yet to come," warned a report issued Wednesday by the UN Children's Fund. By 2010, there will be about 20 million children in sub-Saharan Africa who have lost at least one parent to AIDS, bringing the total number of orphans in the region to 42 million. "This is a crisis that is massive, it is growing and it is long-term," UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said as she launched the report in Johannesburg. "It must be stopped." In the worst-affected countries - Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland - more than one in five children will be orphans by 2010, more than 80 per cent of them because of AIDS, the report said.
