Nordic ceasefire monitors began wrapping up their six-year mission to Sri Lanka on Friday after the government scrapped a truce with the Tamil Tigers, and their mandate, amid a chorus of international concern. The government formally notified mediator Norway late on Thursday it was giving a stipulated 14-day notice period to end the truce.
Military-run Burma put on a show of defiance on Friday on the 60th anniversary of independence from Britain amid global pressure for reform following the junta’s bloody crackdown on dissent. Soldiers raised the national flag at precisely 4.28am local time — the exact moment of freedom from Britain.
The death toll from political violence in Algeria jumped to 56 in December from six in the previous month, bringing to 491 the number of those killed in 2007, according to a Reuters count based on newspaper reports. A total of 37 people, including 17 United Nations staff, were killed in a double suicide bombing in the capital, Algiers, on December 11.
It is Saturday in Soweto and the Aids-ridden township is geared up for its foremost weekend activity: funerals. Traffic officials are dispatched en masse to the major streets where the sheer number of funeral processions would render chaos if one had to rely on traffic lights alone. ”Nowadays young people are dying like flies,” reflects 27-year-old Modise Selebogo.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf called for help from British police in probing the murder of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto as he sought to dampen public anger on Thursday a week after her death. He said a Scotland Yard team would "immediately" come to help resolve doubts surrounding the circumstances of how she died.
Pakistan election officials were Wednesday poised to announce the date of crucial polls, thrown into chaos in the wake of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. A few hours later President Pervez Musharraf is to address the nation for the first time since her slaying at a campaign rally last week.
Police raids, arson and tribal attacks over the last 24 hours have claimed more than 100 lives in Kenya, police and officials said on Tuesday, bringing the toll for five days of post-election bloodshed to 299. ”At least 30 have burned to death inside a church in the Kiamba area,” a police commander said.
Pakistan parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8 will be held in February, a senior election commission said on Tuesday. ”Elections will not be delayed beyond February. We expect it to be towards the later part of next month,” the official said. The commission was to make a public announcement later in the day.
Brutal unrest across Kenya over President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election left about 150 people dead on Monday — some hacked to death — taking the overall toll to at least 185 killed in four days. Police opened fire on some protesters and looters and many people were killed with machetes as ethnic tensions mounted.
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/ 31 December 2007
The year ahead will present South Africa with new tasks and challenges arising from decisions adopted at the recent national conference of the African National Congress, President Thabo Mbeki said in his New Year’s message on Monday. South Africans should respond to the challenges ”bearing in mind the national goal our country has set itself”.
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/ 31 December 2007
Pakistani officials were to meet on Monday to decide the fate of scheduled January 8 elections, after Benazir Bhutto’s party announced it would contest the vote despite her assassination. The vote, seen as a key step in the nuclear-armed nation’s transition back to democracy after eight years of military rule, has been thrown into disarray by her slaying.
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/ 30 December 2007
The son of slain Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was chosen on Sunday to take the mantle of her party and immediately vowed to keep up what he called her struggle for democracy. At an emotional news conference where his father was named co-chair of the Pakistan People’s Party, 19-year-old Bilawal Bhutto said he was ready to lead.
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/ 30 December 2007
Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden warned Sunni Muslims in Iraq not to take up arms against the terror network and promised the "liberation of Palestine" in a new online message. In the 56-minute tape released late on Saturday, the Western world’s most wanted man also accused the United States of seeking to control the region through the Iraqi government.
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/ 30 December 2007
Sudan has accused Chadian aircraft of bombing its western Darfur region in what it called ”repeated aggressions” by its western neighbour. Relations between the two African oil producers have been touchy in recent years as both try to quell insurgencies close to their long and porous border.
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/ 29 December 2007
Tanzania’s ambassador to South Africa was beaten unconscious and several of his guests were assaulted and robbed at his farewell dinner in Pretoria on Friday night. About five armed men pushed aside the barbed wire and jumped over the wall of a diplomatic residence in Pretoria at about 10pm, a government official at the function said.
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/ 27 December 2007
World leaders voiced outrage at the assassination on Thursday of Pakistan’s opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and expressed fears for the fate of the nuclear-armed state. United States President George Bush condemned the killing as a ”cowardly act”.
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/ 27 December 2007
United Nations officials were on Wednesday night working to prevent the expulsion from Afghanistan of two senior Western diplomats who have been accused of holding illegal talks with Taliban leaders in the British theatre of operations in the southern province of Helmand.
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/ 27 December 2007
Six French aid workers were sentenced to eight years of hard labour each after a court in Chad found them guilty on Wednesday of trying to kidnap 103 children from the African country. The court in the capital N’Djamena handed down its sentence on the fourth day of the trial of six members of the French humanitarian group Zoe’s Ark.
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/ 26 December 2007
Gunmen threw grenades at the home of the regional police chief in south-western Somalia, killing two of his grandchildren and a bodyguard while he escaped injury, authorities said on Tuesday. Seven other family members were wounded in the Monday-night attack, which police said was a failed assassination attempt.
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/ 25 December 2007
Diplomatic wrangling dashed hopes for an end to the killing and rape in Darfur this year and a new United Nations-backed peacekeeping mission scheduled to start on January 1 faces an uphill struggle. The combined effects of war and famine have killed at least 200 000 people with more than two million displaced.
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/ 24 December 2007
A first contingent of 100 peacekeepers from Burundi deployed in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Sunday, hours after fighting between Islamist rebels and government forces killed at least four people. The arrival of the soldiers marked the first phase of long-delayed support for 1 600 Ugandan troops.
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/ 24 December 2007
Iran will soon announce an international tender for building 19 nuclear power plants, a week after Russia said it had begun fuel deliveries to the Islamic state’s first such facility. Kazem Jalali, a spokesperson for Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said each power plant would have a capacity of 1 000 megawatts.
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/ 24 December 2007
"A child if I want and when I want," reads the sign at the family-health centre in Niamey where dozens of Niger women come to get free contraceptives. "I was taking the pill without my husband’s knowledge," said Zahratou Amadou, a 38-year-old mother of 10. "When he found out he repudiated me."
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/ 23 December 2007
The handful of grain Abiye Omar clutches in her skinny hand has travelled a long way from the fertile fields of America’s Midwest to the desolate Somali seaside town of Merka. It has sailed on a relief ship through seas plagued by pirates and sharks, then been carried ashore by porters into the hands of aid workers who have to contend with bandits, arsonists and insurgents.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to extend the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for a year and demanded that all militias and armed groups in the volatile east lay down their weapons and start disarming. The council asked the UN force ”to attach the highest priority to addressing the crisis”.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to wrap up the United Nations peacebuilding mission in Sierra Leone in September next year, praising this year’s peaceful and democratic elections in the West African nation and efforts to professionalise its armed forces.
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/ 21 December 2007
We’re in southern Nepal; we’re not quite sure where as we lost the main highway about 30 minutes earlier in a desperate search for a petrol station. We didn’t find one in time. I’m barefoot and covered in dirt, straining to push our auto-rickshaw down a two-lane highway, as my boyfriend steers and tries to pump the clutch into action, writes Melissa Bell.
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/ 20 December 2007
War may break out again in Western Sahara if United Nations-sponsored talks between Morocco and the Polisario Front independence movement fail, Polisario said on Friday. A third round of UN-brokered talks to resolve Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute are set for January 7 to 9 in Manhasset, New York.
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/ 20 December 2007
Aid groups urged the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to set a 30-day deadline for Sudan to stop obstructing the planned January 1 deployment of UN-African Union peacekeepers to Darfur or face sanctions. ”The new hybrid peacekeeping force for Darfur is being set up to fail,” said a statement.
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/ 19 December 2007
Rescue efforts are under way in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after a fleet of boats capsized on the Tshuapa river, killing at least 45 people, reports said on Wednesday. About 80 people were on board the motorised canoes when they went under on Sunday night.
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/ 19 December 2007
Six French humanitarian workers accused of trying to kidnap 103 African children go on trial in Chad on Friday as speculation grows that a diplomatic deal could send them back to France. Although the accused risk forced labour sentences if convicted, Chadian lawyers and many citizens believe they will either be able to serve their jail terms in France
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/ 19 December 2007
The hardest part is yet to come for Beijing Olympic organisers, heading into 2008 with all plans in place but potential pitfalls aplenty in the run-up to the event in August. Traffic congestion, closely linked to air quality, food security, media freedom and human rights as well as boycott calls are issues likely to flare up again over the coming months.