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Discusses Britain's Cable and Wireless (C&W) February 29, 2000 sale of a stake in Hong Kong telecommunications carrier C&W HKT to Richard Li. Li's stake in Internet company PCCW and plan to provide broadband Internet access by cable or satellite in Asia; Singapore Telecom's negotiations with C&W.

The article discusses the politics involved with reproductive health. A decade ago, the world's leaders met in Cairo at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). There, they crafted a plan to achieve "reproductive health and rights for all" by 2015. That plan was wide-ranging--from more contraception and fewer maternal deaths to better education for girls and greater equality for women. The ICPD plan also aimed to change the way those at the sharp end of making policy and delivering services thought about reproduction. It wanted to move away from a focus on family planning (and, by extension, government policies on population control) towards a broader view of sexual health, and systems and services shaped by individual needs. Over the past week, hundreds of government officials, public-health experts and activists met in London to mark the anniversary of the ICPD and to take stock of progress towards achieving its goals. On paper, that progress has been impressive. Governments around the world have introduced legislation that reflects the ICPD's aims. But when it comes to turning policy into practice, "mixed success" is the verdict of a report card just released by Countdown 2015, a coalition of voluntary bodies involved in the field. According to the United Nations' Population Fund (UNFPA), 61% of married couples now use contraception, an 11% increase since 1994. This has helped push global population growth down from 82m to 76m people a year over the past decade. But in some places--particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia--birth rates remain high. Few poor countries have earmarked enough of their budgets to meet their citizens' reproductive-health needs. Nor have donors lived up to expectations.

The article discusses America's current-account deficit and a prediction that the dollar will decline sharply. The dollar's latest slide seems to have been triggered by uncertainty about the presidential election and a flurry of comments from Fed officials. The dollar has fallen by over 30% against the euro since 2001, but its trade-weighted index has fallen by much less because of heavy intervention by Asian central banks, aimed at holding down their currencies against the dollar. Some economists argue that America can sustain its large current-account deficit for at least another decade, without a sharp fall in the dollar, because it will be happily financed by China and other Asian countries. In a series of papers Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Garber at Deutsche Bank have argued that the present arrangements resemble a revived Bretton Woods, the system of fixed exchange rates after the second world war. Currency intervention by Asian central banks helps to explain why America has so far been able to finance its deficit without higher American bond yields or a bigger fall in the dollar. George Magnus, an economist at UBS, argues that the parallels with Bretton Woods are superficial. One big difference is that in the 1960s the United States ran a current-account surplus and was a net creditor to the rest of the world. Today, America is the world's biggest debtor, which could undermine the dollar's role as an anchor currency. Another important difference is that, unlike under the Bretton Woods regime, most Asian countries have scrapped capital controls or where they still exist, as in China, they are leaky. Under Bretton Woods there was no real alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency. Today there is the euro, into which Asians could diversify.

This article reports that the periodical "The Economist" is baffled by all those countries that have sprung up in the place that used to go by the name of the Soviet Union in the periodical. It states that had the Commonwealth of Independent States looked like a fixture, one might have continued to treat all its members as honorary Europeans; but increasingly their differences look larger than what they have in common. Accordingly, papers about the countries of ex-Soviet Central Asia will now usually be found in the Asia section. The other ex-Soviet Asian republics are more awkward. Georgia and Armenia are more European in outlook and proximity than the Central Asian states, and it would be odd to detach their neighbor Azerbaijan from them. So all three stay in Europe, which is, after all, where the periodical puts Turkey, even though most of it is geographically in Asia.