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/ 29 September 2007
Rwanda joined other countries on Friday in appealing for a global moratorium on executions, saying that if its government could abolish the death penalty while perpetrators of the 1994 genocide still await sentences, no country should use it. About 500 000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were massacred in 100 days of frenzied killing led by radical Hutus.
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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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/ 28 September 2007
Israel and the Palestinians could sign a peace deal within six months of an international peace conference scheduled for November, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Friday. ”The meeting in November should define the principles settling the questions over the final status [of the Palestinian territories],” Abbas said.
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/ 28 September 2007
Hundreds of thousands of people awaited desperately needed relief supplies and faced the threat of epidemics on Friday as the death toll climbed in Africa’s worst floods in three decades. At least 300 have died in the flooding since heavy rains began sweeping across the continent two months ago.
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/ 28 September 2007
Kenya’s president rejected a parliamentary Bill that sought to limit probes into corruption cases after Western governments warned it marked a step backwards in the fight against graft. Kibaki had written to the speaker of Parliament outlining his reasons for rejecting the Bill and making recommendations for its amendment.
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/ 27 September 2007
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hopes a new biometric identity card (ID) scheme backed by the European Union can help overhaul its undisciplined armed forces, branded by campaigners as the central African state’s worst rights abuser. After decades as a tool of repression under former leader Mobutu Sese Seko and a devastating 1998 to 2003 war, DRC’s army is bloated, unmanageable and corrupt.
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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
Developing countries are willing to do more when it comes to tackling climate change, but the ”trigger” has to come from the North, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk said on Thursday. In a speech prepared for delivery in Washington, he said participants in such efforts had to include the United States.
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/ 27 September 2007
The United States-sponsored meeting of major emitting countries is aimed at supporting and accelerating the United Nations process on climate change, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted on Thursday. Sceptics have expressed concern that the climate meeting might be an attempt to circumvent the UN process.
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/ 27 September 2007
Floods that have left hundreds of thousands of Africans homeless across vast swathes of the continent have claimed 64 lives in Nigeria and 33 in Burkina Faso, government and aid officials said on Thursday. Nigeria’s Red Cross said the death toll covered a period since mid-July, while 22 000 people have been displaced in 10 sometimes arid northern states.
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/ 27 September 2007
Burma riot police charged a crowd of more than 1 000 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 3 000 people in the ruthless suppression of a 1988 uprising.
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/ 27 September 2007
Mozambique will not attend the forthcoming European Union-African Union summit if Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is excluded, Radio Mozambique reported on Wednesday. Mugabe is barred from travelling to most European countries in terms of sanctions imposed on the Southern African country.
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/ 26 September 2007
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown renewed on Wednesday a pledge to snub Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe at a European Union-Africa summit in December, but vowed to help his suffering people by reiterated London’s support for the ”reconstruction” of the economically ravaged former British colony.
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/ 26 September 2007
World governments vowed on Wednesday to hold Burma’s military rulers to account for a bloody crackdown on mass street protests, as the United Nations Security Council prepared to meet in emergency session and European Union officials began drawing up new sanctions.
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/ 26 September 2007
President Robert Mugabe’s attempts to control prices amid Zimbabwe’s worsening economic crisis have backfired and now even the black market faces shortages, a senior British diplomatic source said on Wednesday. Under Mugabe’s 27-year rule, Zimbabwe has plunged from prosperity to penury.
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/ 26 September 2007
Sleaze is hobbling the recovery of war-ravaged countries such as Iraq and Somalia, which have joined Burma among states perceived as the world’s most corrupt, an anti-graft watchdog reported on Wednesday. Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, covering 180 countries.
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/ 26 September 2007
Troops fired shots over the heads of a large crowd in central Yangon on Wednesday, sending people scurrying for cover as a crackdown intensified against the biggest anti-junta protests in 20 years. Security forces also fired tear gas at columns of monks trying to push their way past barricades sealing off the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma’s holiest shrine.
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/ 26 September 2007
South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu said on Tuesday he was ”devastated” by the human rights abuses of President Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe. Tutu said he struggles to understand how Mugabe changed so drastically after steering the country to independence in 1980.
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/ 26 September 2007
Burma security forces sealed off Yangon’s Shwedagon Pagoda on Wednesday, fired tear gas and arrested up to 80 monks trying to get into the shrine, cracking down on the biggest anti-junta protests in nearly 20 years. Witnesses said some of the deeply revered Buddhist clergy were beaten by riot police taking them away from the shrine.
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/ 26 September 2007
Troops and riot police took up positions outside at least six big activist monasteries in Yangon on Wednesday as Burma’s junta tried to prevent monks leading new protest marches against military rule. There was no immediate word from the monks on whether they would risk their first major confrontation with the junta.
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/ 25 September 2007
Ethiopia said on Tuesday it may terminate the pact ending its border war with Eritrea, accusing its smaller neighbour of breaching the deal on several fronts including coordinating ”terrorist activity”. Relations between the two nations are at their lowest since a 1998 to 2000 border war killed 70 000 people.
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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
Fresh rainfalls and slow relief have deepened the humanitarian crisis caused by record floods in Africa that have affected more than 1,5-million people and killed at least 300, aid agencies warned on Tuesday. The worst floods in three decades have now affected 22 countries and displaced hundreds of thousands.
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/ 24 September 2007
Former Mozambican president Joachim Chissano says Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe should attend the European Union-Africa summit to exchange views on issues in his country. ”I think it will be an opportunity for the EU to discuss with President Mugabe and exchange views,” Chissano was quoted as saying by the government mouthpiece Herald newspaper.
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/ 24 September 2007
An explosion killed two people and injured 11 when it tore through shops early on Monday in the capital of Serbia’s breakaway Kosovo province. The explosion scattered glass and debris from a dozen shops on Pristina’s Bill Clinton Boulevard. Part of a building collapsed.
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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
”Mugabe stands very tall and black,” boasted Herald columnist Nathaniel Manheru in Zimbabwe on Saturday. ”Brown stands white and colonial.” It was a reminder of the intensity of the diplomatic row that has erupted over British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s decision to boycott a Europe-Africa summit if Mugabe shows up.
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/ 22 September 2007
The Dutch government rejected mounting calls for a referendum on Europe’s new reform treaty on Friday night, two years after Dutch voters killed off the European constitution in a referendum that stunned the European Union. Despite Friday’s decision in The Hague, the Dutch coalition is split.
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/ 22 September 2007
The Polish president has launched an advertising campaign to lure home an estimated two million young people who have emigrated abroad. Focusing mainly on Britain where an estimated 600 000 Poles work, President Lech Kaczynski said he wants to attract as many of his compatriots as possible.
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/ 21 September 2007
Gordon Brown or Robert Mugabe? One won’t go to a summit between Europe and Africa in December, but the Portuguese hosts say the potential rewards of closer ties between the two continents outweigh the antagonism between the leaders of Britain and Zimbabwe.
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/ 21 September 2007
Developed countries are not living up to the promise to help alleviate poverty, hunger and under-development elsewhere, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday. For example, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) estimates that only 13 countries are likely to halve extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.