Uganda

Stuck at home for the summer? Don't despair. This month's new novels seem designed for armchair travelers, with locales ranging from Paris to Kampala, Beirut to Orvieto, and Jerusalem to Santiago. I was most impressed by Edmund White's "The Married Man" (Knopf, 323 pages, $25), which is a masterpiece hidden behind a cliche. It starts off innocuously: at a gym in Paris, an aging American falls for a stranger lifting weights. The other man is French, he is married, his name is Julien: the plot seems to have all the makings of a Barbara Cartland novel for gays and lesbians.

THE RECENT discovery of the violent deaths of more than 900 members of a Christian cult in Uganda may seem but another in a long string of tragic events in faraway places. But in this grisly episode lies a distinctly closer-to-home message: The danger of apocalyptic violence, not just in Uganda but anywhere in the world, did not die away with the first days of the new millennium as so many had assumed it would. The urge to "force the end" is distinctly a phenomenon of our moment, and from Heaven's Gate, the "peaceable" cult that committed mass suicide in 1997 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.

ST. CHRISTOPHER'S Episcopal Church in Linthicum honored a special friend Sunday when the Rev. Johvan Turyamureeba was the joint celebrant at the 8 a.m. and 10: 30 a.m. services.Turyamureeba, the canon for missions in a diocese in the southwestern corner of Uganda, is completing a two-year program for a masters degree in theological studies at Virginia Theological Seminary and was attached to St. Christopher's last year as a part of his seminary studies.He will graduate May 20 and return to Uganda on May 27.Parishioners held receptions for him after each service.

This is an excerpt of a New York Times editorial published Friday.LAST YEAR, when Uganda became the first country to get some relief of its external debt under a new program of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, it used the money it saved largely to eliminate fees charged for primary school. The impact was dramatic.While two years ago 54 percent of Uganda's children attended primary school, this year 90 percent do. In contrast, neighboring Zambia, which spends five times more each year on debt service than on primary education, had to raise school fees.

Until a few weeks ago, a select group had been allowed to visit a family of fellow primates rarely encountered by mere humans -- the mountain gorillas of East Africa. It is perhaps the most sublime experience one can have with wildlife in Africa, maybe in the world. But it is no longer available. The gorillas of the mist have become the gorillas of the war zone. Since eight tourists were killed in an attack in Uganda on March 1, the last of the routes to visit these gorillas has closed.

IT TOOK WILLIE B. Lamouse-Smith the better part of a decade to make a small dent in Africa's book famine.But finally, the precious consignment arrived one day last fall at Makerere University in Uganda -- about 250,000 books and journals, with 34 typewriters, collected by Lamouse-Smith from generous Marylanders and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County library.Lamouse-Smith, 63, professor and chairman of UMBC's department of Africana studies, began collecting the books nine years ago because he saw a connection between illiteracy in post-colonial Africa and its bloody conflicts.

PRETORIA, South Africa -- With outside military intervention increasing in the Democratic Republic of Congo's civil war, President Nelson Mandela launched last-ditch peace negotiations here yesterday.But the absence of two key players -- Congo President Laurent Kabila and his ally President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe -- undermined the chances of heading off a military showdown.As the rebels, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, claimed to be within 18 miles of the capital, Kinshasa, Angolan troops reportedly crossed the border to aid Kabila by threatening the rebels' western flank.

SOUTH POLE, January 19, 2001 -- President Clinton today apologized to Antarctica.Speaking to an audience composed of the traveling press, Mr. Clinton said he repented of America's "sin" of neglecting this continent except when America paid a kind of improper attention to it. He regretted that during the Cold War, U.S. policy "subordinated the true interests of Antarctica to geopolitical calculations arising from the conflict with the former Soviet Union."Last...

KAMPALA, Uganda -- Grace Nerima, a 30-year-old mother of four, suspected trouble when her husband stopped wanting to have sex with her. Soon he started picking fights with her over inconsequential matters. Finally he admitted that he had a girlfriend -- and wanted to take her on as his second wife.Polygamy is common in Uganda, as it is in many African countries. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of married Ugandan women share their husbands with at least one "co-wife," and sometimes as many as three.

OPENLY DEFYING one of the founding principles of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Tutsis are making the first serious effort to redraw the African borders since the Berlin Conference of 1884 divided Africa.Although a minority in each of the five Central African countries in which they live, ethnic Tutsis currently find themselves in power in three of these countries (Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi) and are expanding their power base, primarily at the expense of ethnic Hutus, their long-time rivals.