Israel killed 52 Palestinians on Saturday in its deadliest and deepest incursion into the Gaza Strip since pulling out in 2005, stoking fears of a broader conflict that could derail renewed United States-backed peace talks. At least 29 of the dead were civilians, among them women and children, said Palestinian doctors who were working round the clock.
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/ 29 February 2008
Buyers of minerals from rebel areas of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) should be punished under a United Nations arms embargo, a group of experts has told the Security Council. A five-year war in the country has left much of DRC’s eastern borderlands a volatile patchwork of rebel fiefdoms and militia-controlled zones.
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/ 29 February 2008
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called Friday for Sudan to speed up the deployment of peacekeepers to Darfur and to end aerial bombing in the troubled region’s western districts. Miliband said the international community is united in the need for a hybrid United Nations-African Union force, but the effort is stalled by a lack of necessary support from Khartoum.
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/ 28 February 2008
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga signed a power-sharing agreement on Thursday intended to end a post-election crisis that left 1 000 people dead. Crowds of onlookers clapped as the two rivals inked a deal at a televised ceremony to set up a coalition government.
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/ 28 February 2008
Mediator Kofi Annan said Kenya’s government and opposition had reached agreement on a power-sharing deal at talks on Thursday to end the country’s deadly post-election crisis. ”We have come to an understanding on the coalition agreement,” Annan told reporters.
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/ 28 February 2008
South Africa said on Thursday that a report by the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency showed ”increasing confidence” that Iran did not intend to use its nuclear programme for military purposes. But it added that further oversight was needed to verify that Tehran was not building atomic weapons.
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/ 28 February 2008
Mediator Kofi Annan launched a new bid on Thursday for a political compromise to end Kenya’s post-election crisis, bringing the country’s feuding leaders to the same table for the first time in a month. The opposition had threatened to hold mass street protests on Thursday, but called them off after meeting Annan.
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/ 28 February 2008
African Union chief and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete pushed ahead on Thursday with talks to end the Kenyan political crisis. Kikwete chaired talks between President Mwai Kibaki, opposition chief Raila Odinga and former United Nations secretary general and chief mediator Kofi Annan in a fresh bid to resolve the two-month crisis.
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/ 28 February 2008
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed on Thursday to make Hamas militants pay a heavy price for rocket attacks despite United States concerns about civilians in the Gaza Strip. As five more Palestinians were killed, Olmert held talks in Tokyo with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
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/ 28 February 2008
Legsaan Levember can only pray for better days as he huddles with 12 family members in a roadside tent, another victim of South Africa’s spiralling housing backlog. The family uses a plastic sheet to extend their tiny tent, which perches precariously on the slope of a small dune and is regularly blown away by Cape Town’s relentless south-easterly winds.
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/ 28 February 2008
Child rape has increased by 42% in Zimbabwe, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Wednesday, linking worsening child abuse and domestic violence to family tensions caused by the nation’s economic meltdown. Unicef launched a new ”Stand Up and Speak Out” campaign to fight what it called the ”staggering statistics on the unspeakable evils of child abuse”.
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/ 27 February 2008
Kenya opposition leader Raila Odinga on Wednesday called off street protests that had been set to press the government to strike a power-sharing deal to end the country’s post-election crisis.
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/ 27 February 2008
By the end of the year half of the world’s population will be living in cities for the first time in history, the United Nations said in a report released on Tuesday. According to the report, by the year 2050 there will be 6,4-billion people living in cities, up from 3,3-billion now.
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/ 27 February 2008
Britain on Tuesday said that the Kenyan army is now ”by far the best option” to stop a sectarian bloodbath as peace talks in Nairobi between the government and opposition were suspended. Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan suspended talks between the government and the opposition negotiating teams after it became clear they were going nowhere.
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/ 26 February 2008
A new round of talks to end Kenya’s political crisis started on Tuesday with no clear sign of an agreement on power-sharing and with the opposition threatening to resume nationwide protests. The talks being mediated by former United Nations chief Kofi Annan had come to a standstill on Monday.
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/ 26 February 2008
The deadly conflict in Darfur entered its sixth year on Tuesday with no solution in sight, as Khartoum continued to resist the full deployment of a peacekeeping force amid a fresh wave of bombings. The anniversary coincides with visits to the country by Washington’s special envoy for Sudan, Richard Williamson, and China’s point man for Darfur, Liu Giujin, for top-level talks.
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/ 26 February 2008
Two months of violence in Kenya have split the country along ethnic lines and there is a risk of further clashes if the political crisis is not resolved quickly, a top United Nations official said on Monday. Exhausted by a post-election crisis that has killed more than 1Â 000 people, most of the 36-million Kenyans want a quick political deal.
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/ 26 February 2008
The United Nations on Monday warned that it no longer has enough money to keep global malnutrition at bay this year in the face of a dramatic upward surge in world commodity prices, which have created a ”new face of hunger”. ”We will have a problem in coming months,” said Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme.
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/ 25 February 2008
Talks to end Kenya’s political crisis reached a standstill on Monday and negotiators from both sides said President Mwai Kibaki and rival Raila Odinga must now make the hard decisions on sharing power themselves. Negotiating teams met early on Monday to try to finalise agreement on ending post-election turmoil.
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/ 25 February 2008
Uganda on Monday accused Lord’s Resistance Army rebels of breaking a truce by attacking civilians in the Central African Republic, threatening apparent progress at talks to end one of the continent’s longest wars. Representatives of the guerrilla group denied the allegation.
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/ 25 February 2008
World stocks and the dollar rose on Monday as talk of a rescue plan for a United States bond insurer and comments that Qatar is interested in investing in European banks eased concerns about the banking industry. Energy and commodity prices remained firm, with geopolitical concerns in Iran and Turkey lifting oil prices above a barrel.
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/ 25 February 2008
Kenyan leaders were due on Monday to resume power-sharing talks to end the political crisis in the East African state that has sparked violence which has claimed more than 1 000 lives. The negotiations on a power-sharing deal have stalled on the term and powers of a would-be prime minister, a position that currently does not exist.
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/ 24 February 2008
The Ugandan government said it had signed a permanent ceasefire accord with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group on Saturday, a landmark step in efforts to end more than two decades of civil war. Government delegation spokesperson Captain Chris Magezi called the accord ”another major breakthrough”.
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/ 24 February 2008
Nine months after the first arrest warrants were issued for those suspected of being behind atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region, the chief international prosecutor believes he has the masterminds in his sights. International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has vowed to target the most senior people behind the violence.
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/ 24 February 2008
The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached a critical level. Old satellite parts, solar panels and the odd astronaut’s lost glove now pose serious risks to space missions. A report from the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety is calling for stringent international laws to be brought in to avert a tragedy.
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/ 23 February 2008
A United Nations-backed court on Friday upheld the convictions of three former rebel leaders who were sentenced to half-century prison terms last year for rape, murder and other war crimes committed during Sierra Leone’s decade-long conflict. The three were leaders of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council.
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/ 23 February 2008
A shaky peace deal in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) took another hit on Friday when renegade general Laurent Nkunda said his group would no longer participate in daily ceasefire meetings. He said he had taken the decision after the United Nations accused forces loyal to him of massacring at least 30 villagers.
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/ 23 February 2008
African Union Commission chief Jean Ping pushed on Friday for a quick resolution of Kenya’s political crisis, but there was no sign that a power-sharing deal was imminent. Opposition leader Raila Odinga, however, insisted he was Kenya’s rightful leader and refused to rule out further mass protests planned for next week.
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/ 22 February 2008
A month-old peace accord in east Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) faced a fresh hitch on Friday when Tutsi rebels halted participation in a ceasefire commission in protest at United Nations allegations they had massacred civilians. The move announced by renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda posed a potential threat to the January 23 ceasefire.
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/ 22 February 2008
Serb rioters enraged by Kosovo’s secession stormed the United States embassy in Belgrade and set it on fire, leaving one person dead and drawing swift condemnation from Washington and the United Nations Security Council. The US State Department said the lack of protection for its mission was intolerable and demanded the Security Council respond.
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/ 22 February 2008
Tamil Tiger rebels said Sri Lankan government fighter jets killed five civilians in an air raid on their northern stronghold on Friday. Fighting between the military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has intensified since the government formally pulled out of a six-year-old ceasefire pact in January.
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/ 21 February 2008
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged the Sudanese government and all rebel groups to agree to a ceasefire in Darfur, saying deteriorating security is undermining efforts to help thousands of civilians caught in an upsurge in fighting.