Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf called for help from British police in probing the murder of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto as he sought to dampen public anger on Thursday a week after her death. He said a Scotland Yard team would "immediately" come to help resolve doubts surrounding the circumstances of how she died.
The United Nations’s top emergency relief official on Tuesday pressed the Security Council to take on the crisis in northern Uganda, where a brutal rebellion against the government has been raging since 1988. ”We’ve had atrocious massacres and mutilations of civilians in the past few weeks again,” Jan Egeland told reporters.
Zimbabwe was re-elected on Wednesday to the United Nations human rights commission, a controversial body that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wants to abolish this year. Four vacancies on the 53-nation commission were allotted for Africa, and there was African consensus to award one of the slots to Zimbabwe — whose leader Robert Mugabe is under US and European sanctions.
Saxophonist Charlie Parker, who helped invent the modern jazz style of be-bop, was also one of jazz’s first existential heroes — a famously self-destructive genius who died at age 34. Well before his death 50 years ago, hastened by a lifetime battle with booze and heroin, Parker could claim to be one of the most important innovators in jazz history.
The United Nations Security Council was on Monday mulling a United States resolution to impose sanctions on the militias in Sudan’s Darfur region, with opposition strong despite the scope of the humanitarian tragedy. Failure to agree on how to handle Sudan could lead to a split rather than unanimous vote on the resolution.