Burma will accept foreign aid but distribute relief itself, an official newspaper said on Friday, after a disaster rescue team from Qatar that arrived in Rangoon on an aid flight was turned back. Outside frustration is mounting at delays by the generals in giving visas to aid workers and landing rights for flights.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on May 23 to examine how the world’s food crisis is undermining the right to food for millions of people, officials said on Friday. The rights to adequate food and freedom from hunger are enshrined in international law as basic, universal human rights.
Prosecutors for Sierra Leone’s war crimes court are trying to track down -million they say vanished from two United States bank accounts held by former Liberian President Charles Taylor when he was forced from power in 2003. But lawyers defending the former warlord challenged prosecutors to produce evidence that Taylor had salted away state funds for his personal use.
Pressure mounted on the Zimbabwe government on Thursday to admit foreign observers to oversee a presidential election run-off amid fresh claims that pro-government militias were instilling terror in communities in the countryside. Meanwhile, there was still no word on when a second round should take place.
A few aid shipments had arrived in Burma’s main city by Thursday, but the planeloads of supplies and heavy equipment needed to help millions of cyclone victims remain largely stranded outside the country. In a dramatic development, the ruling junta agreed to accept United States emergency aid after last weekend’s cyclone.
A presidential election run-off in Zimbabwe cannot take place given the current levels of violence, the head of a South African contingent of regional election observers said on Wednesday. ”We have seen it, there are people in hospital who said they have been tortured, you have seen pictures,” Kingsley Mamabolo told reporters.
The international community pleaded with Burma’s military rulers on Wednesday to let foreign aid workers and desperately needed relief supplies into the cyclone-crushed country. The United Nations, the United States and France stepped up pressure on the junta to open their doors to foreign aid.
Donor nations pledged a preliminary ,8-billion in assistance to Sudan on Wednesday, aiming to help bolster a 2005 north-south peace deal in the African country still torn by violence in its western Darfur region. Sudan had said it needed ,1-billion up to 2011, on top of -billion in humanitarian aid.
Aid was trickling in on Wednesday for an estimated one million victims of Cyclone Nargis in military-ruled Burma, with the death toll of more than 22 500 expected to mount. France has suggested invoking a United Nations ”responsibility to protect” clause and delivering aid directly to Burma without waiting for approval from the military in Rangoon.
Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have contested half the results of the March 29 parliamentary election, state media said on Wednesday, extending a stalemate that has triggered widespread violence.
Climate change is harder on women in poor countries, where mothers stay in areas hit by drought, deforestation or crop failure as men move to literally greener pastures, a Nobel Peace laureate said on Tuesday. ”Women are very immediately affected, and usually women and children can’t run away,” said Wangari Maathai.
Soldiers, insurgents and bandits are routinely attacking Somalian civilians, carrying out murder, rape, and robbery on villagers, and destroying entire districts, Amnesty International said on Tuesday. Gang rape and throat cutting — referred to locally as ”killing like goats” — is prevalent.
Lawmakers on Tuesday debated legislation to remove former South African president Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) from an apartheid-era United States terrorist blacklist. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, recalled that ANC members could travel to United Nations headquarters in New York but not to Washington DC or other parts of the United States.
Disease, hunger and thirst pose a major threat to hundreds of thousands of survivors of Cyclone Nargis, aid agencies said on Wednesday, urging Burma’s military rulers to open the doors to international humanitarian relief. Aid officials estimate hundreds of thousands are homeless in the swamplands of the delta south-west of the biggest city Rangoon.
Russia’s deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war ”very close”, a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday. Separately, the ”foreign minister” of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia.
Like the state of Israel, Akram al-Shamali and Moshe Feist both turn 60 this year. But that’s about where the similarities end. For Feist, an Israeli, the anniversary is a chance to celebrate the Jewish state’s hard-fought achievements and swap stories of survival and patriotism over a glass of local wine.
A powerful cyclone that slammed into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta triggered a massive wave that gave people nowhere to run, killing at least 15Â 000 and leaving 30Â 000 others missing, officials said on Tuesday. ”More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference.
In politics, as in life, chickens usually come home to roost. Fourteen years of failure in leadership and management at the Department of Home Affairs. Nine years of self-indulgent denialism in the Presidency. Six months of Umshini Wami and the violence and human rights promiscuity it implies — not to mention the failure in intelligence.
Security forces on Monday killed at least five people in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, as they cracked down on riots sparked by rising food prices and record inflation, witnesses said. At least 20 000 people were out on the streets to demonstrate as anger grew at printers of fake money and unscrupulous traders.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday expressed alarm at reports of rising violence and intimidation in Zimbabwe and said he was consulting with African leaders on how to help resolve the country’s election crisis. "I am deeply concerned at reports of rising levels of violence and intimidation" in Zimbabwe, he told reporters.
Burma’s military junta believes at least 10 000 people died in a cyclone that ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta, triggering a massive international aid response for the pariah nation. ”The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10 000, with 3 000 missing,” a Rangoon-based diplomat said in Bangkok.
Sudanese government bombs have hit a primary school and a busy market place in Darfur, killing at least 13 people, including seven children, two aid organisations said on Monday. The Sudanese army has repeatedly denied bombing in the area, which would be a violation of a United Nations Security Council resolution banning all offensive flying.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) on Monday accused Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang of keeping Aids statistics low after an official report was released by the Development Bank of South Africa. ”The minister of health must explain why official statistics are so low,” said DA spokesperson and MP Sandy Kalyan.
Burma said on Monday that nearly 4Â 000 people had been killed in the cyclone that tore into the impoverished and secretive Asian nation at the weekend, and that tens of thousands more could also be dead. The announcement on state television increased the death toll from Tropical Cyclone Nargis more than ten-fold.
Zimbabwe’s ruling party has said that a second round of presidential elections could be delayed by up to a year in a move that would extend Robert Mugabe’s rule even though he admits to having lost the first round of voting five weeks ago. The election commission is expected to meet soon to set a date for the run-off vote between Mugabe and the opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai.
Burma’s military authorities a foreign aid workers struggled on Monday to assess the damage from a devastating cyclone that killed more than 350 people and left tens of thousands homeless. The death toll is likely to climb as the authorities slowly make contact with islands and villages in the delta, the rice bowl of Burma.
A cyclone killed more than 350 people in military-ruled Burma, ripping through Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta where it flattened at least two towns, officials and state media said on Sunday. Packing winds of 190km per hour when it hit on Saturday morning, Cyclone Nargis devastated the Burma’s leafy main city, littering the streets with overturned cars.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday pressed Israel to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians and called Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank ”particularly problematic”. But she said Washington believed an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal was still possible before US President George Bush leaves office in January.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, now in his 27th year as leader of the Arab world’s most populous nation, turns 80 on Sunday with no clear successor in sight. One of the oldest executive heads of state in the world, Mubarak leads a country where more than 60% of the population have never known any other president.
If farmers think they have a tough time producing enough rice, wheat and other grain crops, global warming is going to present a whole new world of challenges in the race to produce more food, scientists say. Farmers will have to change crop management practices, grow tougher plant varieties and be prepared for constant change in the way they operate, scientists say.
The Asian Development Bank called on Saturday for immediate action from global governments to combat soaring food prices and pledged fresh financial aid to help feed the Asia Pacific region’s poorest nations. ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda told a news conference in Madrid, where the bank is holding its four-day annual meeting, that total lending ”could be sizeable, but not enormous”.
Diplomats failed to agree on Friday on a follow-up meeting to an acrimonious 2001 conference on racism after two weeks of difficult negotiations between Western and Islamic countries. The meeting was unable to decide on the venue or duration of a conference to chart progress in the fight against racism since the landmark conference in Durban seven years ago.