The first formal talks in the long process of drawing up a replacement for the Kyoto climate change pact opened in Thailand on Monday with appeals to a common human purpose to defeat global warming. ”The world is waiting for a solution that is long-term and economically viable,” said United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.
At least 11 people were killed in Mogadishu on Saturday when troops at the Villa Somalia presidential palace returned fire against Islamist insurgents who attacked it with mortar bombs, witnesses said. President Abdullahi Yusuf was there at the time, an aide told Reuters, but no one in the hilltop compound was hurt.
Muslim nations on Friday condemned a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Qur’an of inciting violence, and Dutch Muslim leaders urged restraint. Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigration Freedom Party, launched his short video on the internet on Thursday evening, prompting an al-Qaeda-linked website to call for his death.
Somalis uprooted by fighting in Mogadishu looted trucks carrying United Nations food aid on Friday, peacekeepers said, highlighting what relief agencies warn is a fast deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe. Somalia now has one million internal refugees, aid workers say, and their numbers are swelled by an exodus of about 20 000 civilians each month.
The military operation to oust the rebel leader of the Comoros island of Anjouan was hailed on Friday as a success by the African Union, in dire need of a boost to its conflict-resolution record. The first ever AU-backed plan to remove a renegade leader came after failed negotiations.
Kenya’s political rivals traded accusations on Thursday over who is to blame for the deadlock in plans to create a unity government and end the country’s post-election crisis. The share flotation of top cellphone operator Safaricom — the largest IPO ever in East Africa — has also become an issue in the wrangling, officials and analysts say.
United States forces were drawn deeper into Iraq’s four day-old crackdown on Shi’ite militants on Friday, launching air strikes in Basra for the first time and battling militants in Baghdad. The fighting has exposed a rift within the majority Shi’ite community and put pressure on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The new United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, arrived in Kabul on Friday with a pledge to improve coordination with President Hamid Karzai’s government. ”The Afghan government has asked for that for a very long time and we have to respond in a better way than we have managed so far,” said Eide.
The fate of bids by ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato will show if the Western alliance is serious about cooperating with Russia or bent on going it alone, a Kremlin spokesperson said on Friday. Dmitry Peskov said that despite its longstanding status as a partner of Nato, Moscow was still at a loss about the alliance’s plans.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) ousted a record number of cybersquatters from websites with domain names referring to trademarked companies, foundations and celebrities in 2007. Wipo, a United Nations agency based in Geneva, received 2 156 complaints alleging ”abusive registration of trademarks on the internet” last year.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday declared the birth of an Anglo-French axis as a force for progress in Europe and the world, on issues ranging from climate change and nuclear power to United Nations reform and the war in Afghanistan.
Tibetan monks stormed a news briefing at a temple in Lhasa on Thursday, accusing Chinese authorities of lying about recent unrest and saying the Dalai Lama had nothing to do with the violence. The incident was an embarrassment to the Chinese government, which brought a select group of foreign reporters to Lhasa for a stage-managed tour of the city.
The government of Swaziland, one of Africa’s poorest and most Aids-ridden countries, has defended plans to spend nearly ,5-million on celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of independence. The opposition has called for the celebrations, which will also mark King Mswati III’s 40th birthday, to be scrapped or scaled down.
Top international aid agencies warned on Wednesday that war-scarred Somalia has become too dangerous for its workers to help more than one million civilians living rough, as fresh fighting erupted. Four Somali soldiers and two civilians were killed when Islamist fighters raided the town of Jowhar, near Mogadishu, officials said.
About a million people have suffered the effects of floods, cyclones and heavy rains across Southern Africa in the last year, the United Nations said in a statement issued on Tuesday. ”In total, local authorities estimate that 987 516 Southern Africans have been affected adversely by rains, floods and cyclones since October last year.
Serbia has formally proposed partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines for the first time, asking the United Nations to ensure that Belgrade can control key institutions and functions in areas of the newly independent country where Serbs form a majority.
Food rationing will shortly be imposed on millions in desperate need unless donor countries make good a -million shortfall, the United Nations agency that combats starvation warned on Monday. Soaring fuel and grain prices have forced the World Food Programme to send out an ”extraordinary emergency appeal”.
The road from Harar runs for more than 960km east towards the border with Somalia, penetrating deep into the desiccated badlands of the Ogaden desert, the dusty heart of Ethiopia’s war-torn Somali regional state. This is the land that the self-styled separatists of the Ogaden National Liberation Front claim as their own.
The United Nations is to hold its first debate on road safety amid warnings that the problem is a ”public health crisis” on the scale of Aids, malaria and tuberculosis. Next week’s meeting will follow research by the World Health Organisation forecasting that between 2000 and 2015, road accidents will cause 20-million deaths.
Taiwan’s opposition Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has won more than half the vote in Saturday’s election, the party said, auguring improved ties with diplomatic rival China. Ma had won more than seven million votes, the party said, more than half the total 13-million people who cast their ballot.
Senator Barack Obama won a coveted endorsement from fellow Democrat Bill Richardson on Friday as the State Department apologized for snooping into his passport files and those of his two main White House rivals. The decision by the Hispanic governor of New Mexico is a victory for Obama and could improve the Illinois Democrat’s chances of winning over Latino voters.
A rights group on Friday urged Zimbabwe’s security forces to defy commanders who have vowed they would support only President Robert Mugabe to rule the country after next week’s poll. ”Go against the orders of your commanders, lay down your arms and rally behind the people of Zimbabwe to foster reconstruction and development,” said the National Constitutional Assembly.
Leaders of Cyprus’s Greek and Turkish communities agreed on Friday to relaunch reunification talks and to open a barricaded street in Nicosia that symbolises the island’s division. It was the first meeting between Greek Cypriot leader Demetris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat since Christofias was elected to the Cypriot presidency last month.
The international community must overcome its reluctance to get involved in Somalia and help put an end to abuses there, a special United Nations envoy said on Thursday. ”While more people are talking about Somalia, there is still little action to stop the violence,” Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah told the Security Council during a debate on whether to send UN peacekeepers to the East African country.
The United States-led war on Iraq that toppled the brutal regime of dictator Saddam Hussein entered its sixth year on Thursday with millions of Iraqis still battling daily chaos and rampant bloodshed. On March 20 2003, US planes dropped the first bombs on Baghdad.
Attacks on four villages in West Darfur in January and February by the Sudanese armed forces amounted to a ”deliberate” military strategy. The attacks resulted in at least 115 deaths, according to a report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN African Union Mission in Darfur.
Seventeen people were killed in Kenya’s Rift Valley region over the past 36 hours, where cattle theft has fanned tribal animosity, bringing the toll to 25 in three days, police said on Thursday. Cattle raiders killed 12 villagers and police retaliated, killing five of the attackers in the Baringo district.
Serbia’s neighbours in Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria dealt a blow to the Serb campaign to overturn Kosovo’s month-old independence on Wednesday by announcing they would recognise the new republic. In a joint statement issued in Zagreb, Budapest and Sofia, they said the decision was based on ”thorough consideration”.
Battles erupted in Somalia’s capital on Wednesday between Islamist rebels and Ethiopian troops backing the government a day after the United Nations said it was still too dangerous to send peacekeepers there. Witnesses in northern Mogadishu said three Ethiopian soldiers and at least one insurgent were killed as both sides traded heavy fire.
Morocco and Western Sahara’s Polisario independence movement ended a fourth round of talks near New York City on Tuesday without narrowing differences on Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute. Morocco took control of most of Western Sahara in 1975 when colonial power Spain withdrew, prompting a guerrilla war for independence.
Nato troops secured a hostile strip of north Kosovo on Tuesday after Serb riots in Mitrovica killed one Ukrainian United Nations police officer and forced the pull-out of UN personnel from the Serb stronghold. The violence was the worst since Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia on February 17.
At least 68 people were killed in a two-week government crackdown against separatists in Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) western Bas-Congo province, according to internal United Nations reports. Starting on February 28, hundreds of soldiers and police battled members of the ethnic-based political and religious movement Bundu dia Kongo.