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/ 21 September 2009
Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin assailed Nicolas Sarkozy as he went on trial Monday on charges of plotting to smear his arch-rival.
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/ 14 September 2009
France’s most politically charged trial of the decade begins in a week, but the case is already playing itself out in the court of public opinion.
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/ 14 February 2008
Chief mediator Kofi Annan on Wednesday put Kenya’s crisis talks back on course toward a deal after defusing a row over his plan for a ”grand coalition” government to end post-election turmoil. Annan had irked negotiators for President Mwai Kibaki when he told Parliament on Tuesday that a power-sharing government could be a way out of the crisis.
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/ 23 December 2007
Smokers in France are enjoying their last leisurely puffs on a cigarette over coffee or a glass of rouge before café, restaurants and nightclubs join a nationwide ban on smoking on January 1. Eleven months after smoking was outlawed in workplaces, schools, hospitals and shops, the ban is extending to bars and bistros.
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/ 1 December 2007
Final preparations were under way in Russia on Saturday for parliamentary elections expected to hand a sweeping victory to President Vladimir Putin’s party, just three months before presidential polls. From Kamchatka to Kaliningrad, 109-million voters are eligible to cast ballots on Sunday in Russia’s fifth parliamentary elections since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
France, the United States, China and 15 other nations agreed on Monday to redouble efforts to end bloodshed in Sudan’s Darfur region by supporting a new peace force and negotiations on a settlement. ”The international community simply cannot continue to sit by,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the end of the one-day conference.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged world powers on Monday to take a tough line with Sudan if it balks at efforts to end bloodshed in Darfur, and argued that ignoring the situation was tantamount to complicity. ”Silence kills,” Sarkozy told ministers from 20 nations taking part in a one-day meeting in Paris to shore up the peace process in Darfur.
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/ 6 February 2007
Fifty-eight countries agreed on Tuesday to take action to protect children from being recruited as soldiers in wars, joining for the first time an effort that has been largely confined to NGOs. The 58 countries that signed up to the so-called Paris commitments at the end of a two-day conference include 10 of the 12 nations where an estimated 250 000 children bear arms.
South Africa on Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, one of the bloodiest chapters of apartheid, amid renewed debate over whether whites should own up to the atrocities of the former regime. Hundreds of black youths died at the hands of police in Soweto during protests against the enforced use of Afrikaans in schools that began on June 16 1976.
South Africa is running out of ideas on how to pull Zimbabwe out of its crisis, turning to the United Nations to take the lead after a series of failures in tackling its biggest foreign policy headache. President Thabo Mbeki is now pinning his hopes on outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to resolve the Zimbabwean imbroglio, although Harare has rejected UN intervention.