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/ 6 December 2007
Charred bodies and burnt-out trucks still lie on the blackened grass in a valley in eastern Chad two days after the fighting moved further north. Columns of smoke rise up and drift across the smouldering plains beneath Tourka Mountain, a rocky outcrop near the border with Sudan’s Darfur region.
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/ 6 December 2007
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Thursday defended inviting Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to attend a European Union-Africa summit this weekend and vowed to make human rights the first point on the agenda. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is boycotting the Lisbon summit.
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/ 6 December 2007
A parcel-bomb explosion in central Paris killed a legal secretary and injured five others on Thursday, investigators said. The blast went off on the fourth floor of a building housing lawyers’ offices in the capital’s fashionable eighth arrondissement, or district, staff said.
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/ 6 December 2007
As Portugal prepares to host a summit of African and European leaders, the construction in its ex-colony Angola bears testimony to China’s growing influence on the continent. An army of Chinese construction workers is transforming the skyline of Luanda in an alliance which has put the squeeze on European partners.
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/ 6 December 2007
Robert Mugabe, a largely unwelcome guest of the European Union at a summit this weekend, is a hero in the eyes of many Africans for daring to stand up to the West and seize land from white farmers. Many in Europe have been left scratching their heads over how Zimbabwe’s president since independence still commands respect.
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/ 5 December 2007
South Africa said on Wednesday it would not sign a new trade pact with the European Union until its concerns over possible "detrimental impacts" new accords could have on Africa had been addressed. "South Africa is very much opposed to the inclusion of certain trade and services clauses," Foreign Ministry Deputy Director General Gert Grobler told journalists.
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/ 5 December 2007
Africa cannot stop the European Union (EU) if it wants to discuss the issue of Zimbabwe during the weekend’s European-African summit in Lisbon, Portugal, South African Foreign Affairs Deputy-Director General Gert Grobler said on Wednesday. He said that Zimbabwe was not part of the agreed agenda.
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/ 5 December 2007
Nearly two years after the internationally acclaimed author Orhan Pamuk narrowly escaped imprisonment for statements that were thought to ”insult Turkishness”, the publisher of a British writer goes on trial on Wednesday accused of the same charge.
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/ 5 December 2007
Zimbabwe’s former colonial master lost the stand-off over whether he or the British prime minister would attend an upcoming European-African summit, Robert Mugabe declared on Tuesday. Mugabe also said his nation, suffering chronic shortages of basic goods and worsening power and water outages, continued to defy predictions of economic collapse and social upheaval.
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/ 4 December 2007
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on Tuesday expressed his gratitude to European Union and fellow African leaders for enabling him to see off a bid to have him excluded from an EU-Africa summit. ”The sinister campaign led by Britain to isolate us, including the recent attempts to bar us from attending the EU-Africa summit … continues to disintegrate,” Mugabe said in a State of the Nation address in Parliament.
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/ 4 December 2007
Spain backed Britain on Tuesday in calling for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to stay away from a European Union-Africa summit in Lisbon this week. "We would all prefer that he does not take part because he will not bring much and he would be a media distraction," Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters.
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/ 4 December 2007
The United States will slap travel and financial sanctions on about 40 more people with ties to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who has cracked down hard on dissent, a senior US official said on Monday. ”Mugabe’s tyranny needs to end,” said US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer.
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/ 3 December 2007
About 190 nations met in Bali on Monday seeking a breakthrough to a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009 to avert droughts, heatwaves and rising seas that will hit the poor hardest. A new treaty is meant to widen the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 36 industrial countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 5% below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012.
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/ 2 December 2007
Zambia President Levy Mwanawasa has urged the British prime minister to continue speaking out against Zimbabwe until a solution is found to the country’s crises, media reported on Sunday. Mwanawasa welcomed the pressure Gordon Brown was putting on Harare but expressed disappointment at his boycott of next weekend’s European Union-Africa summit.
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/ 1 December 2007
Turkey’s army said it entered northern Iraq on Saturday to tackle up a group of up to 60 Kurdish rebels, a day after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s Cabinet authorised a cross-border operation against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). It was not clear whether the incursion was a major operation by Nato member Turkey aimed at destroying bases of the PKK.
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/ 1 December 2007
Iran was not to blame for the disappointment expressed by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana after key talks in London on the nuclear crisis failed, chief negotiator Saeed Jalili said on Saturday. Solana said on Friday he was ”disappointed” after the last-ditch talks in London failed to produce a breakthrough.
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/ 1 December 2007
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe launched a new attack on Britain on Friday after it failed to prevent him being invited to a European Union summit next month, telling London to stop interfering in its former colony. He also thanked fellow African heads of state for their diplomatic support in what he called an ”onslaught” by Britain and its allies.
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/ 30 November 2007
Turkey’s prime minister said on Friday his Cabinet had authorised the armed forces to conduct a cross-border operation against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, but analysts said major action did not appear imminent. Tayyip Erdogan’s comments seemed chiefly designed to keep up pressure on United States and Iraqi forces to honour pledges to tackle the rebels.
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/ 30 November 2007
Chadian anti-government rebels on Friday declared a ”state of war” against French and foreign military forces in an apparent warning to a European Union peacekeeping force that plans to deploy there soon. French troops and aircraft are stationed in Chad under a bilateral defence accord.
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/ 29 November 2007
British and Irish efforts to retain their imperial measures of pints and miles while surrounded by the litres and kilometres of continental Europe moved a yard closer on Thursday as the European Union Parliament backed the moves. One imperial casualty, though, is the acre.
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/ 29 November 2007
Fresh clashes between Chad’s government army and rebels broke out on Thursday near the eastern border with Sudan, three days after a major battle that shattered a month-old peace accord, army and rebel sources said. Monday’s battle was the heaviest in months in eastern Chad.
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/ 29 November 2007
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, caught in a standoff with Britain which has cast a shadow over an European Union-Africa summit, said on Wednesday he had no objection to dialogue between the two countries. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he will boycott the December 8 to 9 Lisbon summit because Mugabe will attend.
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/ 28 November 2007
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said on Wednesday he would push to create a group of African leaders to resolve a stand-off between Zimbabwe and Britain, which has cast a shadow over a European Union-Africa summit. Wade arrived in Harare after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he would boycott the planned December 8 to 9 Lisbon summit.
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/ 28 November 2007
Chadian rebels warned a European Union peacekeeping force bound for eastern Chad on Wednesday not to side with President Idriss Déby Itno, saying they would fight it as a foreign occupation army if it did so. The warning from the rebel Assembly of Forces for Change followed the biggest battle in months in eastern Chad.
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/ 28 November 2007
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade will fly to Zimbabwe on Wednesday for talks with President Robert Mugabe in an attempt to resolve a row between Harare and London that threatens to derail a European Union-Africa summit next month. Wade will fly to Zimbabwe after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Tuesday he would boycott the planned December 8 to 9 summit in Lisbon.
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/ 28 November 2007
Zimbabwe’s government newspaper offered a chilly, racially tinged welcome on Tuesday to the new United States envoy. The Herald‘s political editor Caesar Zvayi said James McGee had criticised Zimbabwe’s human rights record in statements to the US Senate and, as an appointee of US President George Bush, was likely ”to turn out to be the house Negro”.
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/ 27 November 2007
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown confirmed on Tuesday that he will boycott a European Union-Africa summit to be held in Lisbon next month in protest at the participation of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. ”I will not be attending this summit,” Brown said at a press conference at Downing Street.
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/ 27 November 2007
Internationally sponsored talks over the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo were deadlocked on Tuesday, after Kosovo Albanian leaders rejected Serbia’s proposal for self-governance. Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population wants to break all ties with Serbia.
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/ 27 November 2007
Britain has asked the European Commission to approve the aid it has provided to struggling mortage lender Northern Rock, a Commission spokesperson said on Tuesday. ”Last night [Monday], the British government notified us,” EU competition spokesperson Jonathan Todd said.
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/ 27 November 2007
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said he will attend a European Union-Africa summit in December in Lisbon, triggering a boycott of the meeting by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. ”Yes, I’m going,” Mugabe was quoted on Tuesday as telling Portugal’s Lusa news agency in Mozambique.
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/ 27 November 2007
Soldiers and rebels have both claimed to have killed several hundred of their opponents in combat on Monday in eastern Chad. The battles at Abougouleigne left ”several hundred [rebels] dead, several injured and several prisoners of war”, according to the statement from the army’s general staff.
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/ 26 November 2007
Serbia will not give up ”an inch” of Kosovo, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Monday as talks on the breakaway province’s future entered a critical phase before a United Nations deadline next month. ”Serbia will not let an inch of its territory be taken away,” a defiant Kostunica told reporters.