The United Nations said on Monday that a Russian air force plane shot down an unmanned Georgian spy drone over Abkhazia last month, strengthening Tbilisi’s claims that Moscow is aiding the rebel territory.The UN report was the weightiest independent endorsement to date of Tbilisi’s allegation that a Russian jet downed its spy plane on April 20.
Environment ministers from the G8 rich nations on Monday urged their leaders to set a global target to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a small but vital step in the fight against climate change. But they stopped short of suggesting specific interim targets ahead of 2050, a key demand of developing countries in tough United Nations-led talks to forge a new treaty on global warming.
Foreign aid workers saddled up for the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy Delta on Monday to see whether army-ruled Burma will honour a promise made by its top general to give them freedom of movement. ”We’re going to head out today and test the boundaries,” said an official from a major Western relief agency.
Britain and other European governments should break from the United States over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter said on Sunday. Carter described the current European Union position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as ”supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as ”embarrassing”.
Mozambique has received nearly 20Â 000 citizens fleeing South Africa, said Deputy Foreign Minister Henrique Banze, adding that the government there had set up three reception centres around the capital Maputo. He denied reports that the Mozambican government had declared a state of emergency.
With his rival back in the country, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe fought for his political survival on Sunday as he kicked off his election campaign. Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai arrived home on Saturday after a six-week absence vowing to end the three decade rule of post-independence leader Mugabe in a run-off election scheduled for June 27.
While big international donors try to persuade Burma’s military rulers to open their doors wider to aid, small groups of volunteers are getting past army checkpoints to reach desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis. Among them were Catholics and Buddhists seeking to fulfil a charitable mission under extreme circumstances three weeks after the devastating storm left 2,5-million people destitute.
The World Health Organisation’s 193 member states on Saturday overcame their deep divisions over intellectual property rules and endorsed a strategy to help improve developing-country access to drugs and medical tests.
Thousands of people marched through Johannesburg on Saturday, calling for an end to the violence that has killed at least 50 African migrants and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes. People in Hillbrow, home to many African immigrants, cheered the march, which was organised by churches and labour unions.
Up to 90 000 people could be displaced by fighting in Sudan’s bitterly contested oil region of Abyei where the United Nations is racing against time to provide aid relief and prevent a return to civil war. Two rounds of heavy fighting between government soldiers and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army have largely obliterated Abyei’s once bustling main town.
South Africa’s security chief on Friday accused rightwingers linked to the former apartheid government of fanning xenophobic violence that has spread to Cape Town, the second largest city and tourist centre. At least 42 people have been killed and thousands driven from their homes in 12 days of attacks.
South Africa’s aspirations to lead the continent are being shredded by the xenophobic mobs who have hacked, shot and beaten to death at least 42 African migrants in the land where apartheid was defeated. The mobs accuse the immigrants of depriving South Africans of scarce jobs and fuelling crime.
The Iranian government has proposed the creation of an international consortium to enrich uranium on its own soil as a way of defusing the tense stand-off over its nuclear programme. The proposal is part of a ”new and comprehensive initiative” put forward by Iran ahead of a planned visit to Tehran by Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief.
In an apparent breakthrough for delivering help to millions of Burma’s cyclone survivors, the military government agreed to allow in ”all” aid workers, United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon said on Friday. The UN Secretary General met junta supremo Than Shwe in his remote new capital of Naypyidaw for more than two hours to ask him to permit more foreign expertise.
With an impassive handshake, BUrma junta supremo Than Shwe greeted Ban Ki-moon in his remote new capital on Friday at the apex of a high-stakes aid mission by the United Nations chief for the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The 75-year-old Senior General’s stony-faced silence gave no clues as to whether he would overcome his deep suspicions of the outside world.
World food prices are likely to stay high and volatile for the foreseeable future despite some record crops this year, according to a report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation on Thursday. Food import bills around the world are expected to total more than a trillion US dollars in 2008.
Although the violent nature of crime in South Africa is often highlighted, white-collar crimes are rampant and impact negatively on citizens’ rights. Bribery and corruption were perceived to be the most prevalent crimes, said a South African Human Rights Commission report.
At least 43 Nigerian soldiers who had just returned from a peacekeeping mission in Darfur have been killed in a road accident in the north of Nigeria, a military spokesperson said on Thursday. The soldiers, including an army captain, were in a convoy of seven vehicles in north-eastern Yobe state on Wednesday when one of them collided with an oncoming petrol tanker.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon flew to Burma on Thursday to press the ruling generals to allow a full-blown international aid effort for 2,4-million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis. The government’s official toll is 77 738 people killed and 55 917 missing, and it also estimates the damage to the economy at -billion.
The senior leader of Somalia’s Islamist opposition vowed on Wednesday to expel United States-backed Ethiopian troops by force and create an Islamic republic in the war-torn country. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who led Somalia’s Islamic Courts movement, said Mogadishu’s Western-backed Transitional Federal Government was run by ”traitors”.
President Robert Mugabe accused Zimbabwe’s opposition of embarking on ”an evil crusade” as he stepped up claims on Wednesday that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is to blame for mounting violence. ”The MDC opposition, formed at the behest of Britain, is on an evil crusade of dividing our people,” Mugabe said.
Twenty-one Sudanese army soldiers have been killed in fierce fighting with southern forces in the contested oil-rich town of Abyei, army sources said on Wednesday. The army accused the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, from semi-autonomous South Sudan, of attacking its positions in the town on Tuesday.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon headed to south-east Asia on Wednesday on a mission to secure more help for cyclone victims in Burma, whose military rulers have finally granted an aid agency the use of helicopters to deliver supplies. The UN says up to 2,4-million people are struggling to survive.
This year’s poor rains have nearly killed Bizunesh. The rangy three-year-old weighs less than 4kg. Her long limbs, weak and folded like a praying mantis, cannot carry even her slight weight. She cannot speak. She doesn’t want to eat. Health officials say she is permanently stunted.
There is a growing danger of a coup by military hardliners in Zimbabwe to prevent opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai from toppling President Robert Mugabe, a leading think tank said on Wednesday. The International Crisis Group called for African mediation leading to a national unity government led by Tsvangirai as the best way to resolve the crisis.
In the current scandal of the attempt to ship tons of arms and ammunition to Zimbabwe it is the Chinese who have spoken the most sense. China’s foreign ministry said the country’s shipment of mortar grenades, rockets and bullets was ”perfectly normal trade”.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Tuesday appealed to governments to do more to save Africa from disease. ”We cannot lose Africa,” Tutu told the 193-nation World Health Assembly. ”The cradle of humankind” is threatened by ”disease, conflict and destruction”.
A severe drought in Ethiopia threatens up to six million children, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) warned on Tuesday. "Up to six million children under five years of age are living in impoverished, drought-prone districts and require continuation of urgent preventative health and nutrition interventions," Unicef said in a statement.
Top Indian and Pakistani Foreign Ministry officials met on Tuesday to review their four-year-old peace process that has stalled since domestic political turmoil erupted in Pakistan last year. It is the first contact India has had with leaders of a new Pakistani civilian government.
Nigeria has become the world piracy ”hot spot”, with its prized oil industry a particular target, and the raiders have exposed flaws in the country’s security. Despite the massive revenues earned from oil, officials concede Nigeria is ill-equipped to combat pirates who ply the seas with speed boats, modern machine guns and radios.
Fighting resumed on Tuesday in Abyei, the flashpoint oil-rich border area between north and south Sudan whose status remains contested three years after the end of civil war, aid workers said. ”It began early this morning and now it seems like the fighting has stopped,” Kouider Zerrouk, the deputy spokesperson for the United Nations mission in Sudan, said.
Burma’s neighbours appeared to have reached a compromise with the regime on Monday that would finally allow significant amounts of international aid to reach the survivors of the deadly cyclone, more than two weeks after it struck. An Asian-led task force will be formed to help funnel relief into the isolated country.