Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cancelled his visit to Libya on Wednesday, sparing an African Union summit a diplomatic dilemma.
This was not how Moammar Gadaffi wanted to start his tenure as chair of the African Union.
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/ 4 February 2009
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi’s drive to create a ”union government” for all of Africa has instead heightened divisions on the continent.
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/ 2 February 2009
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi vowed on Monday to push for the creation of a ”United States of Africa”, as he was elected head of the African Union.
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/ 10 November 2008
The US said on Sunday it has begun transferring more than -million in Libyan money to the families of American victims of the Lockerbie bombing.
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/ 31 October 2008
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi was due to arrive in Russia on Friday for the first time since 1985 on a visit that could revive military cooperation.
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/ 6 September 2008
Condoleezza Rice on Friday night became the most senior United States official to visit Libya in more than half a century.
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/ 1 September 2008
Moammar Gadaffi on Monday accused corrupt officials of looting the country’s oil wealth and said its people should be given the money directly.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is due in Libya on Saturday to sign an accord aimed at resolving colonial era disputes.
Libya and the US have signed a compensation deal for American victims of Libyan attacks and US reprisals, paving the way for normalisation of ties.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi said on Tuesday a European Union proposal for an economic and security union with southern Mediterranean states was an insult to Arabs and Africans.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi has accused Europe of deliberately provoking the drowning of illegal African migrants as they try to reach Europe by sea, the official Jana news agency reported on Friday. ”Dozens [of migrants] die and hundreds drown or are drowned deliberately,” the official Libyan news agency quoted Gadaffi as saying.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi accused a ”corrupt” government of failing to manage the country’s oil wealth and ordered it to hand out oil money directly to the country’s five million people. Western diplomats said the call, late on Wednesday, appeared aimed at putting pressure on the government to speed up reforms.
A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi is mediating over two Austrians held by al-Qaeda in North Africa and is hopeful they will be freed soon, an Austrian politician was quoted as saying. Saif al-Islam, who heads the Gadaffi Foundation charity, has been in touch with the kidnappers, said Carinthia governor Joerg Haider.
Austria sought international help on Monday to free two nationals seized three weeks ago in Tunisia after the kidnappers, a group linked to al-Qaeda, extended their deadline for a proposed prisoner swap. Abductors from the al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb are now demanding a ransom of €5-million.
Sudan President Omar al-Bashir on Tuesday raised doubts over a peace deal that Senegal said the leaders of Sudan and Chad are to initial in Dakar on the eve of an Islamic summit. Bashir referred to a Saudi-brokered deal signed in Riyadh in May 2007, when the two leaders made a pilgrimage to Mecca and prayed together inside the Kaaba, the holiest Muslim shrine.
Centuries before European colonialists carved up Africa, Arab traders marvelled at the profits to be reaped in the fabled lands south of the Sahara. ”In the country of Ghana, gold grows in the sand as carrots do and is plucked at sunrise,” wrote Ibn al-Faqih, a ninth-century chronicler.
Libya’s Parliament passed a -billion budget for 2008 aimed at giving Libyans a direct share in oil wealth after leader Moammar Gadaffi said economic development was too slow, state media reported on Tuesday. Many Libyans say they are still waiting to benefit from soaring oil revenues and rising foreign investment.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi urged a sweeping reform of government on Sunday, saying most of the Cabinet system should be dismantled as it had failed to manage the North Africa’s country’s windfall oil earnings. Gadaffi said that big projects were behind schedule and so ordinary people should themselves devise a new way of sharing out oil revenues.
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/ 21 February 2008
At the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, Britain’s royals were branded the ”Dracula family” and a former spy chief was made to sweat in the witness box, pledging that assassinations were not part of the ethos of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
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/ 5 February 2008
The United Nations Security Council on Monday unanimously condemned the rebel attacks in Chad and urged world support for the embattled government as the insurgents threatened a new assault on the capital. A statement drafted by France, Chad’s former colonial ruler, "strongly condemns these attacks and all attempts at destabilisation by force".
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/ 3 February 2008
Fierce fighting with tanks and helicopter strikes rocked the capital of Chad for a second day on Sunday as rebels surrounded President Idriss Déby Itno in his palace and hundreds of foreigners fled the country. International aid organisations reported bodies in the streets and hundreds of people wounded.
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/ 3 February 2008
Fighting restarted on Sunday around the presidential palace in the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, where rebel forces have surrounded President Idriss Déby Itno and loyalist troops, residents said. This is despite an earlier report that the main leader of the rebels had accepted a ceasefire proposed by Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi.
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/ 3 February 2008
The United States of Africa is one of few concrete plans on which African leaders agreed as they struggled with issues of peacekeeping and political disputes at this week’s continental summit. The problem is, so many countries want to be Washington, DC, and presidential candidates are already rumoured.
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/ 3 February 2008
General Mahamat Nouri, the main leader of Chadian rebels in control of large parts of the capital, Ndjamena, has accepted a ceasefire proposed by Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi, Libyan news agency Jana reported. The rebels seized Ndjamena on Saturday after intense fighting with government forces.
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/ 2 February 2008
African Union leaders condemned the latest unrest in Chad and Kenya on Saturday at the close of a summit overshadowed by new crises on the continent and which saw little headway achieved on older ones. The pan-African body’s summit wrapped up even as military sources said that rebels had seized control of the Chadian capital.
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/ 13 January 2008
Up to a million migrants have gathered in Libya, from where they will attempt to sail across the Mediterranean for Europe and, ultimately, the United Kingdom. New estimates reveal that there are two million migrants massed in the North African country and that half of them plan to sail to the European mainland and travel on to Britain in the hope of building a new life.
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/ 22 December 2007
An Ariane 5 rocket blasted off in French Guiana on Friday to put into orbit the first African telecommunications satellite as well as another made by a United States-Japanese joint venture, Arianespace said. The rocket, the 36th launch of an Ariane 5 and the sixth this year, lifted off at 9.42pm GMT.
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/ 18 December 2007
Spain’s government estimated on Tuesday that joint business between Spanish and Libyan firms should amount to more than -billion. Gadaffi’s visit focused on ”the interest of both countries to promote economic cooperation, telecommunications, tourism and even water management,” said the government.
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/ 9 December 2007
German Chancellor Angela Merkel directly confronted Robert Mugabe over human rights abuses in front of European and African leaders in Portugal on Saturday, putting the Zimbabwean leader under the spotlight at a summit that has been overshadowed by the despot’s presence.
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/ 8 December 2007
Leaders of Europe and Africa opened a landmark summit on Saturday designed to forge a new partnership of equals, but with strains showing over trade and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s presence. ”We are here … to write a new page in the history of Europe and Africa,” Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said in an inaugural address.
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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.