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Botswana: Countries
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Botswana is planning to amend its constitution to remove clauses that privilege Tswana-speaking tribes in selecting the House of Chiefs. Currently, the 15-member house includes eight ex officio members from the country's "principal tribes" - including Botswana's first female chief - as well as four elected members and three chosen by the other 12. The proposed amendment would do away with the distinction between "principal" and minority tribes and provide for a fully elective house.
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Botswana is dominated by the Kalahari Desert, which covers up to 70% of the land surface of the country. The Okavango Delta, the world's largest inland delta, is in the northwest. The Makgadikgadi Pan, a large salt pan lies in the north.
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Although Botswana's economic outlook remains strong, the devastation that AIDS has caused threatens to destroy the country's future. In 2001, Botswana had the highest rate of HIV infection in the world (350,000 of its 1.6 million people). With the help of international donors... it launched an ambitious national campaign that provided free antiviral drugs to anyone who needed them, and by March 2004, Botswana's infection rate had dropped significantly. But with 37.5% of the population infected, the country remains on the brink of catastrophe. President Mogae won a second and final four-year term in Oct. 2004.
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Letshwiti Tutwane reports on the progress of Botswana's first full-time family court after seven months of operation. The court is the creation of Ghanaian-born Magistrate Kofi Acquah Dadzie, who has served as a law professor, court administrator and judge in Botswana for more than a decade and is the author of several books on criminal law and legal procedure. Like other recently-established family courts in developing countries, Magistrate Dadzie's court provides litigants with the services of a specialist in family law who can advise them of their rights rather than administering impersonal justice:
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Botswana is among the countries hardest hit by AIDS. In 2005 there were an estimated 270,000 people living with HIV. This, in a country with a total population below two million, gives Botswana an adult HIV prevalence rate of 24.1%, the second highest in the world after Swaziland. (An earlier UNAIDS estimate of 37.3% prevalence in Botswana is now thought to have been too high.)1
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Although Botswana is rich in diamonds, it has high unemployment and stratified socioeconomic classes. In 1999 it suffered its first budget deficit in 16 years because of a slump in the international diamond market. Yet it remains one of the wealthiest as well as most stable countries on the continent.
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