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.
Sky-rocketing food prices in Egypt since the start of the year are being matched by a rumbling wave of popular discontent and unprecedented strikes and demonstrations. Textile workers, teachers, doctors and accountants have all threatened strikes under the united banner of ”Stop the expensive life” while doctors went ahead last week with a one-hour work stoppage.
The Mozambican government has made an urgent appeal to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to help more than 60 000 people left destitute when Cyclone Jokwe hit northern and central parts of the country. The WFP said in a statement it would begin distributing food to needy communities early next week.
Hundreds of Serbs in north Kosovo clashed with United Nations police and Nato peacekeepers on Monday in the worst violence since the Albanian majority declared independence last month. Riots erupted in the town of Mitrovica after several hundred UN special police backed by French Nato peacekeepers stormed a UN court in the town and arrested dozens of Serbs.
A South African woman has accused Indian peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo of raping her while on leave, a media report said on Tuesday. SA police detained three Indian army officers working with United Nations peacekeeping forces in the Central African nation on March 12.
Conservatives won a majority in Iran’s parliamentary vote, state television said on Sunday, but the new assembly may still give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a tougher time ahead of next year’s presidential election. Western powers embroiled in a deepening stand-off with Tehran over its disputed nuclear plans condemned Friday’s election as unfair.
A grouping of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters on Sunday backed United Nations-led efforts to forge a global pact to fight climate change but disagreed on a sectoral approach to curb emissions from industry. G20 nations held three days of talks near Tokyo to discuss ways to tackle rapidly rising emissions.
Rioting erupted in a province neighbouring Tibet on Sunday, two days after ugly street protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule in Lhasa that the contested region’s government-in-exile said had killed 80 people. A police officer said that about 200 Tibetan protesters had hurled petrol bombs and burnt down a police station.
China flooded the streets of Lhasa with riot police on Saturday as the international community urged an end to the bloodshed in Tibet that has already claimed at least 10 — possibly dozens more — lives. Thousands of protesters smashed government offices in Xiahe after marching through the streets chanting support for the Dalai Lama.
South Africa’s once notorious Robben Island penal colony risks ghost-town status as its last residents trickle off in search of creature comforts on the mainland. The population of penguins, seals and feral cats far outnumbers the 112 human inhabitants of the present day heritage site — mostly former prison warders and their families.
Sierra Leone’s military chiefs are working on means to downsize from its current 10 000 soldiers to 8 500, Defence Minister Palo Conteh said on Friday, according to a state radio report. ”We cannot allow a large army …We have to downsize to a lean army that can react quickly to a given situation,” he said.
Iran began counting votes on Saturday that are likely to keep conservatives in control of Parliament after many opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were blocked from standing in the election. The United States, at loggerheads with Iran over its nuclear programme, said any result was ”cooked”.