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/ 17 November 2007
Governments must do more to fight global warming, spurred by a new United Nations scientific report and damage to nature that is already as frightening as science fiction, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday. Ban said that he had just been on a trip to see ice shelves breaking up in Antarctica and the melting Torres del Paine glaciers in Chile.
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/ 17 November 2007
A United Nations climate conference agreed on Friday a blueprint for fighting global warming and said governments have only a few years to avert some of the worst impacts. Delegates at the 130-nation talks stood and applauded after chairperson Rajendra Pachauri brought down the gavel on the November 12 to 17 meeting in Valencia, Spain, that wraps up six years of work.
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/ 15 November 2007
A planned United Nations-African Union peace force for Darfur could fail unless disputes with Sudan over its make-up are resolved and key specialised units found. The 26 000-member force aims to bring security to the western Sudanese region after four-and-a-half years of conflict.
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/ 14 November 2007
The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday urged arch-rivals Eritrea and Ethiopia to settle their border dispute peacefully and to take ”concrete steps” to demarcate their frontier. It also appealed to the two sides to ”refrain from using force and settle their disagreements by peaceful means”.
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/ 13 November 2007
Detained Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto called on Tuesday for military leader Pervez Musharraf to step down as president, isolating him in the run-up to a general election. Britain stepped up pressure on Musharraf, who imposed emergency rule on November 3, backing a 10-day Commonwealth ultimatum for him to end the emergency.
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/ 13 November 2007
Pakistani police put opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest for a week on Tuesday to thwart a protest procession as President Pervez Musharraf came under growing international pressure to end emergency rule. Military ruler Musharraf set off a storm of criticism when he imposed emergency rule on November 3.
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/ 13 November 2007
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday hailed as a ”significant breakthrough” last week’s agreement by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda to deal with illegal armed groups in the eastern DRC. Ban urged both Kinshasa and Kigali to ”act urgently to implement all the agreed measures”.
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/ 11 November 2007
The toll from some of the worst fighting in Somalia’s war-wracked capital climbed to 59 on Saturday, as thousands fled the city fearing more clashes between Ethiopian forces and rebels, witnesses said. Residents recovered bullet-riven bodies, ripped limbs and shattered skulls on the blood-streaked streets.
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/ 10 November 2007
Ethiopian troops shelled suspected Islamist hideouts on Friday in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, where some of the worst clashes in months have left at least 43 dead in two days, many of them civilians. The escalating violence came as the Ethiopian army tried to flush out pockets of insurgents in southern districts of the Somali capital.
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/ 9 November 2007
Corpses were scattered on Mogadishu streets on Friday after overnight fighting between Somali insurgents and Ethiopian troops that killed 12 people. The bodies of the dead could be seen in the city’s northern Sqa Holaha neighbourhood, where insurgents dragged dead Ethiopians through the streets on Thursday.
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/ 7 November 2007
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said on Tuesday he was committed to the north-south peace deal that ended Africa’s longest civil war and there would be no return to hostilities after a crisis threatened the pact. ”I would like to assure you there will be no return to war whatsoever,” he said at a state banquet with South African President Thabo Mbeki.
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/ 3 November 2007
The United Nations’s special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, was expected in Rangoon on Saturday for talks with the country’s ruling generals amid a row over the threatened expulsion of another diplomat. Gambari’s visit comes amid conflicting signals from the junta over its willingness to reform, in the wake of street protests against the ruling regime.
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/ 2 November 2007
The United Nations launched a new website powered by Google and network equipment maker Cisco on Thursday that will show how and where the world is succeeding or failing in meeting the Millennium Development Goals on ending poverty.
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/ 31 October 2007
The Turkish army on Wednesday said it killed 15 Kurdish separatists near the Iraqi border, as ministers discussed possible economic sanctions against Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish government. The latest fighting took place in the Cudi Mountains in Sirnak province, where helicopters and artillery have been pounding Kurdish rebels since Monday.
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/ 30 October 2007
The United Nations Security Council renewed arms and diamond sanctions against Côte d’Ivoire on Monday in a bid to make the West African country stick to the terms of a peace process. A resolution passed by the council extended the sanctions for a further year but promised to review them during that period.
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/ 28 October 2007
Sudan’s government declared an immediate unilateral ceasefire at the opening of Darfur peace talks on Saturday, but the absence of key rebels cast doubt on whether the move could produce meaningful progress. One rebel leader who did attend the gathering in the Libyan town of Sirte voiced reservations about Khartoum’s move.
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/ 27 October 2007
Darfur peace mediators said they will press on with negotiations due to start Saturday in Libya despite the decision by two main rebel groups to boycott the talks, saying time was running out for the war-torn Sudanese region. Officials from the United Nations and the African Union plan to open the negotiations with a call for an immediate ceasefire.
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/ 26 October 2007
Turkish helicopters ferried more troops to the border with Iraq on Friday as diplomatic efforts got under way in Ankara to avert a major offensive against Kurdish guerrillas based in northern Iraq. Turkey has massed up to 100 000 troops along the mountainous border before a possible cross-border operation to crush about 3 000 guerrillas of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
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/ 11 October 2007
Darfur peace talks, aimed at stopping chaotic violence plaguing Sudan’s west, will be a ”moment of truth”, United Nations envoy Jan Eliasson said on Thursday. He urged all of the more than a dozen fractured Darfur rebel factions to attend the talks due to start in Libya on October 27 and said an urgent ceasefire would be the priority.
Detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party dismissed the Burma junta’s offer of talks as surreal on Friday as a United Nations envoy warned of ”serious international consequences” from the junta’s brutal suppression of pro-democracy protesters.
Despite gradually easing its iron grip on Burma’s main city on Thursday, the junta continued to round up scores of people and grill hundreds more arrested during last week’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy marches. One freed monk said some had been beaten when they refused to answer questions about their identity.
The African Union on Monday began probing an unprecedented attack on one of its bases in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur that left 10 peacekeepers dead and 25 missing, vowing to punish those responsible. ”The inquiry is under way and we will make its conclusions public,” AU Mission in Sudan spokesperson Noureddine Mezni said.
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/ 28 September 2007
Eritrea, in a letter published on Friday, urged the United Nations to force its arch-foe, Ethiopia, to urgently implement a border ruling, warning it feared Addis Ababa was preparing to resume war. In the letter, Foreign Minister Osman Saleh said he believed that Ethiopian threats to scrap the Algiers peace deal that ended their bloody 1998 to 2000 border war were a precursor to an attack.
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/ 27 September 2007
Troops cleared protesters from the streets of central Yangon on Thursday, giving them 10 minutes to leave or be shot as the Burma junta intensified a two-day crackdown on the largest uprising in 20 years. At least nine people were killed, state television said, on a day when far fewer protesters took to the streets after soldiers raided monasteries in the middle of the night.
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/ 27 September 2007
Burma riot police charged a crowd of more than 1Â 000 protesters after they pelted soldiers with rocks and water bottles in central Yangon on Thursday and at least one person collapsed as shots were fired, witnesses said. One man was on the ground, unconscious, but it was not clear whether he was alive or dead.
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/ 27 September 2007
Burma’s generals launched pre-dawn raids on rebellious monasteries on Thursday in their crackdown on the biggest anti-junta protests in 20 years, defying desperate international calls for restraint. It was unusually quiet on the streets of Yangon, where troops killed an estimated 3Â 000 people in the ruthless suppression of a 1988 uprising.
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/ 25 September 2007
President George Bush announced new United States sanctions against Burma on Tuesday as world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly focused on rising protests against military rule in the South-East Asian state. Bush urged all nations to ”help the Burmese people reclaim their freedom”.
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/ 25 September 2007
President George Bush is set to announce new United States sanctions against Burma over human rights as the annual United Nations General Assembly gathering of world leaders gets under way on Tuesday. Bush will advocate supporting groups in Burma that are trying to advance freedom and announce new sanctions directed at key members of the military rulers.
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/ 24 September 2007
Negotiations on an effective climate regime must be concluded by 2009, Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk told a high-level meeting on climate change at the United Nations in New York on Monday. The exceptional one-day summit gathers about 150 nations.
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/ 24 September 2007
Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on Sunday there was ”no war in the offing” between his country and the United States. He told the CBS programme 60 Minutes: ”It’s wrong to think that Iran and the US are walking toward war. Who says so? Why should we go to war?”
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/ 23 September 2007
The United Nations’s new envoy to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, held his first talks in Mogadishu on Saturday with the embattled transitional government’s top leaders, the UN said. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s special representative discussed the results of a recent national reconciliation congress.
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/ 23 September 2007
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki met ministers from world powers and neighbouring countries on Saturday after telling the United Nations secretary general he could guarantee security for a broader UN role in Iraq. Ministers from Iraq, its neighbours and world powers met at UN headquarters.