The Dalai Lama said on Tuesday he will stand down if violence in Tibet spirals out of control, after the Chinese accused him of masterminding the unrest. ”If things become out of control then my only option is to completely resign,” the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, told a news conference.
Conservatives won a majority in Iran’s parliamentary vote, state television said on Sunday, but the new assembly may still give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a tougher time ahead of next year’s presidential election. Western powers embroiled in a deepening stand-off with Tehran over its disputed nuclear plans condemned Friday’s election as unfair.
Protesters in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, burnt shops and vehicles and yelled for independence on Friday as the region was hit by its biggest protests for nearly two decades, testing China’s grip months before the Olympics. Peaceful street marches by Tibetan Buddhist monks over previous days gave way to bigger scenes of violence and resentment in the remote, mountainous region.
Sudan vowed on Wednesday to continue its search for a French special forces soldier missing in war-torn Darfur for two days after his European Union peacekeeping patrol strayed across the border from Chad. The commando went missing on Monday when at least one vehicle taking part in the EU’s mission to Chad crossed into Sudan.
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/ 27 February 2008
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said on Wednesday that Danes will not be allowed to set foot in his country after Danish newspapers reprinted a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. Protests and rioting erupted in 2006 in Muslim countries around the world when the cartoons first appeared in a Danish daily.
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/ 21 February 2008
In an unusual show of unity, the two secretary generals of the two factions of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have described the dialogue that was meant to resolve the country’s meltdown as ”dead”, painting a dire scenario for Zimbabwe after its upcoming elections.
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/ 20 February 2008
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf rejected demands to quit on Wednesday and called for a ”harmonious coalition” as victorious opposition parties mulled a grouping that could force the key United States ally from power. Musharraf was making his first official comments since Monday’s crucial parliamentary vote.
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/ 19 February 2008
The Egyptian government has summoned the ambassador of Denmark in Cairo to protest the reprinting of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday. The Information Ministry also said it has banned issues of four Western newspapers.
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/ 18 February 2008
The South African government is still deciding whether to recognise Kosovo as an independent country, Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said on Monday. It is expected that the decision would have to be taken soon as it would again be discussed by the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday afternoon.
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/ 14 February 2008
China was facing a major international crisis linked to the Olympics on Thursday amid mounting pressure over its role in Darfur after United States filmmaker Steven Spielberg severed his links to the Games. So far neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Olympic organising committee has responded to the decision by Spielberg.
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/ 12 February 2008
International troops stepped up patrols in East Timor’s capital, Dili, on Tuesday as President Jose Ramos-Horta recuperated in Australia after an assassination bid doctors said he was lucky to survive. Residents packed markets as usual, seemingly oblivious to a state of emergency.
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/ 5 February 2008
Millions of Chinese are likely to spend the biggest holiday of the year without power and water after more than a week of wild winter weather that shut down transport links. Railways and highways were returning to normal across China on Tuesday but millions are still trying to catch trains, planes and buses.
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/ 4 February 2008
Sudan and the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force have agreed the terms under which the 26Â 000-strong force will deploy in western Darfur, removing a major barrier to its operations. Experts estimate about 200Â 000 people have died and 2,5-million been driven from their homes.
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/ 4 February 2008
Resolutions at the United Nations or African Union could alter the mission of French troops in Chad, France’s Foreign Minister said on Monday as a first planeload of evacuees landed at a Paris airport. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Defence Minister Herve Morin said French forces secured Chad’s airbases and were protecting French and foreign civilians.
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/ 2 February 2008
Chinese state security forces have arrested one of the country’s most prominent civil rights activists in an apparent crackdown on dissent ahead of the Olympics. Hu Jia — who used blogs, webcasts and video to expose human rights abuses — is expected to face charges of inciting subversion of state power, his lawyers said on Saturday.
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/ 1 February 2008
Russia accused Europe’s main election watchdog of trying to sabotage plans for monitoring its presidential election next month, the latest round of an increasingly bitter dispute with the West over democracy. Russia said the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring body, ODIHR, was trying to politicise monitoring of the March 2 election.
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/ 16 January 2008
The anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd scored a victory on Wednesday in its high-seas campaign to obstruct a Japanese whale hunt in the Antarctic, forcing the fleet to a standstill while officials tried to unload two protesters who had boarded a harpoon vessel from their rubber boat.
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/ 16 January 2008
Cold weather and heavy snow have killed more than 100 people and more than 35 000 head of cattle in the past week across Afghanistan, officials said on Wednesday. Several major roads have also been blocked by avalanches and hundreds of people have been affected by bad weather, they said.
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/ 14 January 2008
Russia announced on Monday it will not issue new entry visas to staff working in the British government’s cultural offices in two regions, sharpening a row that has soured already-poor relations. Russia ordered the British Council to halt work at the two regional offices from January 1 in a move both sides have linked to a diplomatic feud.
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/ 13 January 2008
Five tourists and their pilot have been killed in Namibia after their light aircraft crashed into a house on take-off, officials said on Saturday. The five dead tourists were identified as Israeli diamond-cutters, according to the Israeli-founded humanitarian organisation Zaka, responsible for the recovery and identification of body parts.
Scotland Yard strengthened its team aiding the probe into the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Wednesday as concerns for the country’s nuclear security grew. Three more detectives arrived from London, including an expert in the type of explosives used in the gun and suicide-bomb attack that killed Bhutto.
Pakistan’s opposition parties demanded better security on Thursday as the nation prepared for a lengthy campaign ahead of February 18 elections, a week after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The country’s main political parties confirmed they would resume the race to restore democracy but said the government must ensure candidates are protected.
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/ 17 December 2007
Russia warned on Monday that Kosovo could slip into ”uncontrollable crisis,” ahead of a United Nations Security Council showdown over the Serbian province’s push for independence. The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that the ”indulgence” of some countries in allowing Kosovo to move towards independence could have ”serious negative consequences” for stability.
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/ 7 December 2007
The leaders of Africa and the Europe Union (EU) gathered in Lisbon on Friday for a summit designed to forge a new era in ties, but which is in danger of being overshadowed by the presence of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The two-day summit in the Portuguese capital is set to be dominated by issues such as trade, immigration, the environment and human rights.
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/ 24 November 2007
Botswana’s government denied on Friday accusations it was preventing Bushmen from returning to their ancestral lands despite a court ruling last year granting them that right. The Bushmen have accused the government of refusing to transport them back, let them hunt or supply them with water.
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/ 21 November 2007
China has committed to sending an engineering unit of peacekeepers to Darfur at the end of the week, the top United Nations peacekeeping official said on Wednesday. China has about 1 800 peacekeepers deployed abroad, making it the second-largest contributor after France.
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/ 7 November 2007
Georgian police firing rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons fought running battles with anti-government protesters on Wednesday, plunging the ex-Soviet republic’s capital, Tbilisi, into chaos. All day hundreds of riot police in black body armour clashed with demonstrators demanding the resignation of President Mikheil Saakashvili.
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/ 6 November 2007
Ethiopia on Tuesday said it had no plans to go to war with rival Eritrea over their disputed border, and again urged Asmara to pull its troops back and begin dialogue over marking the frontier. Ethiopia’s comments came a day after the International Crisis Group warned the two nations could easily slide into a repeat of their 1998 to 2000 border war.
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/ 31 October 2007
European Union and African ministers met in Accra, Ghana, on Wednesday to decide whether to risk a diplomatic storm by inviting Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe to an EU-Africa summit. Britain has said it will boycott the proposed summit in Lisbon if Mugabe attends. Some African nations have said they will stay away if the Zimbabwean leader is not invited.
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/ 30 October 2007
Spain ”disagrees” with charges filed against seven Spaniards in Chad over an alleged operation by a French charity to abduct 103 children to France, its Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday. ”The government disagrees with this accusation,” Spain’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Bernardino Leon, told Spanish public radio RNE.
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/ 30 October 2007
Chadian authorities charged nine French nationals on Tuesday with abduction and fraud after they were detained trying to fly 103 African children to Europe to live with families, Chad’s government said. A Chadian prosecutor said the French faced five to 20 years of hard labour if convicted in the landlocked African country.
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/ 25 October 2007
A Darfur rebel group has attacked a Sudanese oilfield and kidnapped a Canadian and an Iraqi worker, a leader of the group said on Thursday, vowing further attacks. ”We attacked Defra oilfield and kidnapped two foreign workers, one is Canadian and another is Iraqi,” said Abdelaziz el-Nur Ashr, field commander for the Justice and Equality Movement.