The United Nations urged a summit on the global food crisis on Tuesday to help stop the spread of starvation threatening nearly one billion people by lowering trade barriers and removing export bans. ”Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially when man-made,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders.
Britain is ”reviewing” Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s honorary knighthood, a government spokesperson said on Monday, amid reports that the first steps had been taken to revoke the title. On Monday, Channel 4 News television reported, without citing its sources, that the first steps had been taken to strip Mugabe of the knighthood.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe made a surprise appearance on Monday at a world food summit in Rome, drawing fierce criticism from the British government. In his first official trip abroad since elections in March, Mugabe attended the summit organised by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Britain criticised as obscene the presence of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe at this week’s global food summit in Rome, saying he had inflicted shortages on millions of his own people by his ”profound misrule”. Mugabe flew into Rome late on Sunday, making his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western leaders as fraudulent.
The rise of biofuels is not only adding to the global food price crisis but also poses a risk for peasants, pushed off their land to make way for energy crops, a report prepared for this week’s food summit said. The use of food such as maize, palm oil and sugar to produce fuel has been blamed in part for record high commodity prices.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe flew into Rome for a global food summit on Sunday, his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western and opposition leaders as fraudulent. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”It is a matter of concern to us and we would prefer that he did not attend.”
Macedonia’s parliamentary election descended into chaos on Sunday after one person was killed and nine wounded in shootings in ethnic Albanian areas, with voting halted in one town after a gun battle. The poll is seen as a test of the nation’s political maturity after campaign violence raised fears that slow progress toward European Union membership could be further delayed.
At least three people were wounded in a shooting in an ethnic Albanian area of the Macedonian capital, Skopje, during the country’s parliamentary election on Sunday, police and party officials said. ”We were attacked,” said Izet Mexhiti, a senior official of the ethnic Albanian Democratic Union for Integration party.
A landmark international convention banning cluster munitions was formally adopted by 111 countries in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday in a move supporters hope will stigmatise the lethal weapons as much as landmines. There were no objections to its adoption, which came after 12 days of robust negotiations.
Osama bin Laden has plenty on his mind but he managed to pay close attention this month to the events surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary and the parallel commemoration of the ”nakba” — the catastrophe — that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 meant for the Palestinians.
Western governments lashed out at the extension of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest, but the outrage at Burma’s generals was tempered by concern over disrupting aid flows to desperate cyclone victims. Burma has been promised millions of dollars in Western aid after Cyclone Nargis, but this cut no ice with the junta regarding the opposition leader.
Fifa president Sepp Blatter will forge ahead with plans to curb the number of foreign players at soccer clubs, saying on Tuesday that the organisation should coral the world of sport into helping make it happen. The Swiss head of world soccer’s governing body insisted that Fifa would not be ”going into confrontation” with any employment laws.
World leaders are to meet next week for urgent talks aimed at preventing tens of millions of the world’s poor dying of hunger as a result of soaring food prices. The summit in Rome is expected to pledge immediate aid to poor countries threatened by malnutrition as well as charting longer-term strategies for improving food production.
A World Trade Organisation (WTO) mediator issued new proposals on Monday for opening up services such as telecoms and banking as part of a global trade deal. But the new text, replacing a previous document issued in February, did not set dates for revised offers or final commitments in the services negotiations.
French fishermen headed into tense talks on Monday to decide on whether to keep up their strikes and blockades over fuel costs, as a hard-core fringe continued to disrupt port activities. About 50 fishermen from Brittany, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were meeting in the key fishing port of Boulogne-sur-mer.
Environment ministers from the G8 rich nations on Monday urged their leaders to set a global target to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a small but vital step in the fight against climate change. But they stopped short of suggesting specific interim targets ahead of 2050, a key demand of developing countries in tough United Nations-led talks to forge a new treaty on global warming.
Britain and other European governments should break from the United States over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter said on Sunday. Carter described the current European Union position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as ”supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as ”embarrassing”.
The founder and chief commander of Colombia’s Farc rebel force, Manuel Marulanda, has died after more than 40 years fighting the state from jungle and mountain camps. If confirmed, the death of Manuel Marulanda, who organised the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas in the 1960s, would be the heaviest blow yet to Latin America’s oldest insurgency.
The Iranian government has proposed the creation of an international consortium to enrich uranium on its own soil as a way of defusing the tense stand-off over its nuclear programme. The proposal is part of a ”new and comprehensive initiative” put forward by Iran ahead of a planned visit to Tehran by Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief.
There were tears and sweat aplenty in Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium on Wednesday, but barely any blood. English fans kept calm. Russia’s police avoided running amok. The result was that stereotypes of Russia as a harsh forbidding place lost another chunk of credibility, and its quest to be treated as a ”normal” country on the post-Cold War stage advanced a further step.
British Airways risks further undermining its relationship with pilots on Thursday as it starts selling tickets for its transatlantic OpenSkies airline. The Paris-to-New York service will begin flying on June 19 with the threat of crippling industrial action still hanging over its owner.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon flew to Burma on Thursday to press the ruling generals to allow a full-blown international aid effort for 2,4-million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis. The government’s official toll is 77 738 people killed and 55 917 missing, and it also estimates the damage to the economy at -billion.
Burma’s ruling military junta took diplomats on a tour of the storm-ravaged Irrawaddy delta on Saturday as its toll of dead and missing soared above 133 000 people, making Cyclone Nargis one of the most devastating ever to hit Asia. An estimated 2,5-million people are clinging to survival in the delta.
Burma said on Friday that more than 133 000 people were dead or missing in the cyclone disaster, nearly doubling the toll from the worst disaster in the country’s history, which hit two weeks ago. State television said 77 738 were dead and 55 917 missing — with 19 359 people injured — according to the latest figures.
Torrential tropical downpours lashed Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on Friday, deepening the misery of an estimated 2,5-million destitute survivors of Cyclone Nargis and further hampering aid efforts. Burma state television raised its official death toll on Thursday to 43 328. Independent experts say the figures are probably far higher.
Chad’s foreign minister risked alienating his country even further from Sudan on Wednesday by urging the international community to arm-twist Khartoum into resolving the Darfur crisis. Sudan severed diplomatic ties with Chad on Sunday, accusing Ndjamena of backing a rebel assault on the Sudanese capital at the weekend.
China ramped up its massive military rescue effort in the quake-hit south-west on Thursday, where more than 40 000 people lay dead or buried under rubble and rescue teams fought to save the living. Premier Wen Jiabao ordered another 30 000 troops and 90 helicopters to the disaster zone to reinforce the rescue operation.
Western powers kept up the pressure on Burma’s generals on Thursday to allow a massive aid effort as relief workers struggled to help an estimated 2,5-million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis. The European Union’s top aid official has warned that the military government’s restrictions on foreign aid workers were increasing the risk of starvation.
Burma tightened access to its cyclone disaster zone on Wednesday, turning back foreigners and ignoring pleas to accept outside experts who could save countless lives before time runs out. A top European Union humanitarian official said there was now a risk of famine, after the storm destroyed rice stocks in a main farming region.
The most striking image of Spain’s drought, that has forced Barcelona to ship in water, has been that of the underwater church which emerged from a drying dam. For most of the past four decades, all that has been visible of the village of Sant Roma has been the belltower of its stone church, peeping above the water beside forested hills from a valley flooded in the 1960s to provide water for the Catalonia region.
Armed police tried to prevent the United States ambassador to Zimbabwe and several other diplomats from leaving a hospital where victims of post-election violence were being treated Tuesday, an Agence France-Presse correspondent with the convoy said.
China’s biggest earthquake for a generation left tens of thousands dead, missing or buried under the rubble of crushed communities on Tuesday, plunging the nation into an all-out aid effort. Rescue teams struggled by air, land and water to reach the areas of south-western China stricken by the huge quake that demolished schools, homes and factories.