The United Nations urged a summit on the global food crisis on Tuesday to help stop the spread of starvation threatening nearly one billion people by lowering trade barriers and removing export bans. ”Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially when man-made,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders.
Foreign aid groups pressed Burma on Tuesday to stop closing cyclone relief camps as international experts kicked off a mission to pin down the scale of the devastation a month after the storm. Cyclone Nargis is officially thought to have left 134 000 people dead or missing and 2,4-million destitute.
Britain is ”reviewing” Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s honorary knighthood, a government spokesperson said on Monday, amid reports that the first steps had been taken to revoke the title. On Monday, Channel 4 News television reported, without citing its sources, that the first steps had been taken to strip Mugabe of the knighthood.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe made a surprise appearance on Monday at a world food summit in Rome, drawing fierce criticism from the British government. In his first official trip abroad since elections in March, Mugabe attended the summit organised by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
World leaders gathered in Rome on Tuesday for a United Nations summit on food security as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged "hard decisions" and heavy investment in agriculture. "For years, falling food prices and rising production lulled the world into complacency," Ban said, adding: "Governments put off hard decisions."
The Johannesburg High Court has granted an urgent interdict preventing the relocation of foreigners displaced by xenophobic attacks who are being accommodated at the city’s Cleveland and Jeppe police stations, Lawyers for Human Rights said on Monday.
Britain criticised as obscene the presence of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe at this week’s global food summit in Rome, saying he had inflicted shortages on millions of his own people by his ”profound misrule”. Mugabe flew into Rome late on Sunday, making his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western leaders as fraudulent.
There were a few tense moments on Monday when a crowd of several hundred refugees marched to Parliament to air their grievances over the recent xenophobic violence. After being addressed by, among others, Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign, sections of the crowd surged towards a small line of police officers outside the main gates of Parliament.
The rise of biofuels is not only adding to the global food price crisis but also poses a risk for peasants, pushed off their land to make way for energy crops, a report prepared for this week’s food summit said. The use of food such as maize, palm oil and sugar to produce fuel has been blamed in part for record high commodity prices.
Shortages of bread in Zimbabwe are expected to worsen after preparations for the country’s winter wheat crop failed, state media said on Monday. The state-controlled daily Herald said that farmers planted 8 963 hectares of wheat this winter, only 13% of a government target of 70 000 hectares.
A United Nations nuclear watchdog team will visit Syria on June 22 to 24 to pursue an investigation into United States intelligence alleging that Damascus secretly built an atomic reactor, the agency’s chief said on Monday. The alleged reactor site was destroyed in an Israeli air raid last September and Washington handed over intelligence to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The United Nations Security Council meets the key players in the Somalia conflict on Monday to try to persuade the disparate factions to cooperate and restore order to the desperately poor and lawless Horn of Africa country. Somalia has been without a central government since the toppling of a dictator in 1991.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe flew into Rome for a global food summit on Sunday, his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western and opposition leaders as fraudulent. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”It is a matter of concern to us and we would prefer that he did not attend.”
Insurgents fired mortars at a plane that was due to take Somalia’s president to Djibouti, but he was unharmed and travelled to a meeting with a United Nations security council delegation, officials said on Sunday. President Abdullahi Yusuf was due to meet the delegation in Djibouti, where his interim government and opposition exiles are participating in peace talks.
Burma insisted on Sunday that there must be ”no strings attached” to foreign aid destined for its hundreds of thousands of cyclone victims, triggering a sharp reaction from donor countries. Deputy Defence Minister Aye Myint told a regional security forum in Singapore that authorities were trying their best to help their people.
Twenty-nine people, mostly children, were killed and 35 wounded in weekend flash floods in the eastern Ethiopian city of Jijiga, officials said. ”We have recovered 29 bodies so far from early Friday’s floods in Cheraketo [district]. A majority of those were children,” regional president Abdullahi Hassan said.
Burned and looted huts stretch as far as the eye can see in Sudan’s oil-rich town of Abyei, now empty of civilians, the United States special envoy to Sudan, Richard Williamson, said on Saturday. Williamson, who toured Abyei on Friday, said he saw ”scorched earth” devastation in the town where heavy fighting last month sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing.
Hundreds of women converged on a stadium on the outskirts of Harare on Saturday to pray for peace ahead of the country’s tense presidential run-off amid mounting political violence. Zimbabweans go to the polls on June 27 for a second-round presidential election between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Negotiations sponsored by the United Nations and aimed at bringing the Somali government and its main political foes into direct dialogue were due to resume on Saturday in Djibouti. The first round of discussions ended on May 16 and although the rivals did not engage in direct talks, the move was seen as a breakthrough in efforts to end conflict.
Anti-immigrant violence in South Africa has killed 62 people and wounded 670 this month, police said on Saturday, raising an earlier toll of 56 dead after several victims died in hospital. ”In total, at 6am on Thursday morning, we had 62 dead people and 670 injured,” national police spokesperson Sally de Beer said after the violence that started two weeks ago subsided.
Burma’s junta on Saturday came under renewed international pressure from rights groups and the United States defence chief, who said its slow response to the cyclone disaster had cost "tens of thousands of lives". US Defence Secretary Robert Gates criticised the delay in allowing in foreign aid, saying US ships could have swiftly brought relief.
The United Nations independent expert on racism urged South Africa on Friday to bring to justice those responsible for recent xenophobic violence that claimed more than 50 lives this month. ”I condemn these acts in the strongest terms,” special rapporteur Doudou Diene said as he called on South African authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice.
When some multinational companies dump chemicals into the sea, they call it ”ocean fertilisation”. This practice is near the top of the agenda at the United Nations conference on biological diversity in Bonn that ends on Friday. Practically all developing countries want the conference to approve a moratorium on ocean fertilisation.
The African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) and other youth bodies on Friday launched a campaign against xenophobia following the recent attacks on foreign nationals in South Africa. Briefing the media in Johannesburg, ANCYL president Julius Malema extended his apology and assured foreigners they were welcome in the country.
It has been described as a global crisis pushing 100-million people into hunger, threatening to stoke social and political turmoil and set the fight against world poverty back by seven years. Now, the food price crisis will be tackled by world leaders, who meet in Rome next week to seek ways of reducing the suffering for the world’s poorest people.
A planned lodge development at the settlement of Molapo in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve has become a source of controversy. Tourists who frequent the 40-room lodge’s luxury accommodation will enjoy the sights of the Kalahari. The outlook for indigenous Bushmen from the reserve is less positive, however.
Most nations erect grandiose monuments to their historical triumphs. Eritrea put up a pair of sandals. The sculpted black metal shoes in Asmara’s Shida (Sandal) Square, recalling the footwear of Eritrea’s rebels, were a symbol of its remarkable 30-year independence war against its giant neighbour, Ethiopia, which ended with secession in 1991.
Urging decisive action against Sudanese war-crimes suspects, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor said on Friday he would announce details of a new case next week against senior players in the Darfur conflict. "I will inform the … [United Nations] Security Council on June 5 when I will present my second case," prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said.
Osama bin Laden has plenty on his mind but he managed to pay close attention this month to the events surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary and the parallel commemoration of the ”nakba” — the catastrophe — that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 meant for the Palestinians.
The exiled leader of Burundi’s last rebel group returned to the capital, Bujumbura, on Friday to begin implementing a stalled deal seen as the final obstacle to peace in the tiny Central African country. Agathon Rwasa, leader of the Forces for National Liberation, arrived at Bujumbura airport for talks between his ethnic Hutu group and Burundi’s mixed but Hutu-led government.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai launched a scathing attack on President Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe on Friday, saying he had transformed a country rich in natural resources into a ”state of despair”. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) chief also vowed there would be no amnesty for perpetrators of political violence if he takes power.
President Thabo Mbeki must release the letter he allegedly wrote to George Bush asking the American president to ”butt out” of Zimbabwe, the Democratic Alliance said on Thursday. Mbeki’s four-page letter to Bush apparently criticised the United States for taking sides against Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe.