European football governing body Uefa on Monday announced a range of tougher sanctions for European football, including a five-match ban for racist or insulting conduct and a two-match ban for players who simulate being fouled. European football’s new disciplinary regulations for the coming season also include ”improper conduct of a team” .
A United Nations human rights body told Washington on Friday that any ”secret detention” centres for terrorism suspects it operates abroad violates international law and should be shut immediately. The UN Human Rights Committee said the United States appears to have been detaining people ”secretly for months and years”.
World Trade Organisation (WTO) nations on Thursday endorsed suspension of free-trade negotiations after they collapsed on Monday, diplomats and trade officials said. Several countries attacked the so-called Group of Six of leading trading powers for refusing concessions to open the way for a treaty.
The director general of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Pascal Lamy, said on Monday that he was recommending an indefinite suspension of the troubled five-year round of global trade talks. "The only course of action I can recommend is to suspend the negotiations across the round as a whole," Lamy told journalists, without setting a date for restarting the talks.
Last ditch talks to keep hopes alive of a global free deal faced a deepening crisis on Monday after trading powers failed to achieve a breakthrough at a marathon first session, diplomats said. The so-called G6 — Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, the European Union and the United States — must reach agreement on how to boost trade in farm and industrial goods.
Bluefin tuna stocks in the Mediterranean Sea and East Atlantic Ocean are on the brink of extinction because of rampant illicit fishing, the environmental group WWF said on Wednesday. A report by the WWF said that bluefin tuna catches are at least 40% higher than an internationally-approved quota of 32 000 tonnes, and are deliberately under-reported at official level.
Trading nations are now in a race to another last-ditch deadline 28 days away to overcome weekend failure in Doha Round negotiations to free up trade, but prospects for a deal and ending the ”crisis” for the World Trade Organisation (WTO) appear slim.
World Trade Organisation (WTO) members on Friday began another bruising attempt to revive the Doha Round talks on tearing down barriers to global commerce, as doubts rose about what they would be able to achieve. "We’re going to try," Canadian Ambassador Don Stephenson told journalists.
Sudan’s war-ravaged region of Darfur needs a United Nations peacekeeping force, despite President Omar al-Beshir’s repeated opposition to deployment of Western forces, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Thursday. Annan said that such a force would be essential to uphold the "tenuous and incomplete" peace accord between Khartoum and rebel groups.
About 100 people are believed to have died in a suspected outbreak of pneumonic plague in the strife-torn north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in Geneva on Wednesday. The WHO said that suspected bases of bubonic plague have also been reported.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday that 100 people have died of suspected pneumonic plague in eastern Congo. Preliminary results from diagnostic tests have confirmed pneumonic plague, WHO said in a statement. Suspected cases of bubonic plague have also been reported, but the total number is not yet known, WHO said.
The incidence of new HIV infections appears to have stabilised for the first time in the 25-year history of Aids, although the global pandemic will still have a deep, long-term impact, according to a new United Nations report. However, huge problems remain, the UN agency coordinating the fight against HIV/Aids warned on Tuesday.
United Nations agencies called on Monday for field hospitals, medicines and tents to be rushed to Indonesia within days as the global relief effort to help tens of thousands of earthquake victims gathered pace. In Geneva, UN and Red Cross agencies met to try to coordinate the huge mobilisation.
United Nations and Red Cross agencies were meeting in Geneva on Monday to coordinate a mounting international relief effort for thousands of victims of Indonesia’s deadly earthquake. The death toll from the earthquake has risen to at least 5 136, the Social Affairs Ministry said on Monday.
The United Nations, aid agencies and national governments were scrambling on Sunday to get food and supplies to Indonesian towns and cities that have been reduced to rubble by an earthquake that left thousands dead or homeless. As photos and footage emerged of stunned, anguished survivors limping over crumbled buildings, agencies and governments offered millions of dollars, tonnes of supplies and hundreds of personnel.
A dissident Iranian journalist, Akbar Ganji, and a lawyer and broadcaster in Zimbabwe, Arnold Tsunga, will share a leading international human rights award this year. The award is presented every year by 11 of the world’s major human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Polio has returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo for the first time in six years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced on Friday. WHO spokesperson Fadela Chaib told reporters that a two-and-a-half year old girl had been paralysed by a strain of the polio virus that had been carried from India via Angola.
More than 12-million people in the world are locked in a modern form of slavery, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said on Wednesday as France marked its abolition of the practice more than 150 years ago. The ILO has said that globalisation is helping to fuel forced labour, especially in Europe.
Life expectancy for women in Zimbabwe has plummeted to just 34 years, by far the lowest in the world according to data released on Friday by the World Health Organisation. Women in the Southern African nation and in nearby Swaziland are the only ones in the world who are not expected to live into their forties.
Ethiopian children are facing a new threat after two years of drought because recent rainfall has increased the risk of lethal disease, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Friday. Damien Personnaz, a Unicef spokesperson, said that rain in parts of the Oromia region had raised the spectre of diarrhea and malaria.
South African explorer Mike Horn and his Norwegian colleague Borge Ousland have reached the North Pole after a 60-day crossing that is said to be the first-ever accomplished during the polar night, their website announced on Friday. The explorers said they had reached the North Pole at 4pm GMT on Thursday.
Most of the world is on target to reduce the impact of tuberculosis (TB), but efforts have yet to bear fruit in Africa where the disease goes hand in hand with Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday. In its annual report on the global impact of TB, the WHO said the disease claimed 1,7-million lives in 2004.
The top United Nations humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, on Wednesday urged Sudan’s government to accept the intervention of UN peacekeepers to tackle worsening strife in the western region of Darfur. ”The UN should be able to take over security in Darfur simply because the world is not able to equip the African Union (AU) force as it should.”
Most Indian Ocean coral reefs which were hit by the December 2004 tsunami escaped serious damage, but their full recovery could be hampered by humans, the World Conservation Union warned on Wednesday. Most of the ocean’s tsunami-affected coral reefs could recover within five to ten years.
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/ 15 February 2006
The worst drought to hit Somalia in a decade could soon begin claiming lives in the Horn of Africa nation, the international Red Cross warned on Wednesday. ”People aren’t dying of hunger today in Somalia, but that could change fast,” said Pascal Hundt, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross mission there.
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/ 9 February 2006
Campaigners on Thursday charged that the global tobacco industry is trying to water down an international treaty which aims to cut deaths and illness caused by smoking. A coalition of activists said they were particularly worried by industry lobbying activities in developing countries.
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/ 7 February 2006
Gunmen have stolen 20 trucks carrying aid in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, the World Food Programme said on Tuesday. Christiane Berthiaume, spokesperson for the United Nations agency, said the attacks on several convoys took place in recent weeks in zones controlled by Darfur’s rebels.
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/ 31 January 2006
World airlines are set to make losses of $4-billion or more over the coming year, despite continuing growth in air travel, the top industry association said on Tuesday. Air passenger traffic grew by 7,6% in 2005, driven largely by the Middle East and in Latin America, the International Air Transport Association said.
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/ 30 January 2006
Natural disasters were on the rise last year, leaving tens of millions of people destitute and in need of aid, but they claimed fewer lives, a United Nations monitoring body said on Monday. The overall death toll dropped to 91 900, with 73 338 of the dead in Pakistan’s quake zone alone.
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/ 30 January 2006
Pampered zoo animals in the Swiss city of Zurich gobbled up 500 tonnes of fresh food prepared by a dedicated gourmet chef last year, including 21 tonnes of meat, 714 garlic bulbs and 11 135 kiwi fruit. More traditional dishes were also on offer for the 4 000 animals.
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/ 25 January 2006
Stars and famous brands are continuing to battle cyber-squatters, with the number of complaints filed in 2005 jumping by a fifth, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) said on Wednesday. Wipo said its arbitration centre received 1Â 456 cyber-squatting cases last year, or 20% more than in 2004.
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/ 23 January 2006
About 20 000 people have fled violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to seek refuge in the border to Uganda over a four-day period, the United Nations refugee agency said on Sunday. Most of the refugees said they had fled to escape violence, while about 5 000 said they left the DRC because they feared attack.