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/ 4 December 2007
Israel said on Tuesday it believed that Iran had restarted its atomic-weapons programme and that a United States-backed campaign to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions must continue despite a US report it had halted the work. ”It is vital to pursue efforts to prevent Iran from developing a capability like this,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told reporters.
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/ 4 December 2007
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) troops clashed with rebels in the country’s east for a second straight day on Tuesday as they sought to take control of a strategic village, the army said. Fighting in the past two days has killed four soldiers and injured about 20.
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/ 4 December 2007
Ethiopia has warned that the world’s disinterest in sending peacekeepers to Somalia was dampening hopes of achieving peace in the shattered African nation. Of the 8 000 peacekeepers the African Union pledged to send to bolster President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s weak government, only 1 500 Ugandan troops are actually on the ground.
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/ 4 December 2007
A 190-nation climate meeting in Bali began a hunt for a new global deal to fight global warming by 2009 on Tuesday with skirmishing about how far China and India should curb surging greenhouse gas emissions. ”The conference got off to a very encouraging start,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat.
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/ 4 December 2007
African states should address the needs of local markets and of their regions before looking at what can be exported globally, and not the other way round as is currently the case. This proposal was made at a meeting of the Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy, which was held in Tanzania from November 27 to 29.
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/ 3 December 2007
Hello kitty kitty kitty … Are you an orphan? Are you Sudanese? Chadian? Are you a sub-Saharan African suffering from mild mental retardation? Are you an African woman suffering from the African male? Would you like an Oxfam biscuit? Organic antiretrovirals? Have you been raped? You might not know it, but you are an orphan, a refugee.
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/ 3 December 2007
Leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, wary of the repercussions of Iran’s nuclear programme, opened a two-day summit on Monday at which they were joined by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was the first Iranian president to attend the gathering of the neighbouring bloc of wealthy Gulf Arab oil producers.
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/ 3 December 2007
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) army attacked a stronghold of renegade Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda on Monday, a day after his men seized a strategic town from the government and forced out thousands of civilians, United Nations officials said.
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/ 3 December 2007
The United Nations’s top aid official, John Holmes, arrived in Somalia on Monday, calling for more to be done to help the Horn of Africa country where almost 6 000 civilians have been killed in fighting this year. UN officials say Somalia’s humanitarian crisis is Africa’s worst, with one million people displaced.
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/ 3 December 2007
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Monday he had ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in his first official act after being sworn in as leader. ”Today I have signed the instrument of ratification of the Kyoto Protocol,” Rudd said in a statement.
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/ 3 December 2007
About 190 nations met in Bali on Monday seeking a breakthrough to a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009 to avert droughts, heatwaves and rising seas that will hit the poor hardest. A new treaty is meant to widen the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 36 industrial countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 5% below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012.
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/ 2 December 2007
World leaders will converge on the tropical island of Bali this week for the start of negotiations that experts say could be the last chance to save the Earth from catastrophic climate change. The United Nations conference of 191 countries is the beginning of talks to agree a new international treaty to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
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/ 2 December 2007
Tens of thousands of people filed into Ellis Park Stadium on Saturday for a 10-hour music extravaganza beamed to millions around the globe for World Aids Day. The concert at the 50Â 000-seater stadium got under way in the afternoon and lasted late into the night, with 30 local and international artists performing, ranging from Ludacris to Peter Gabriel.
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/ 2 December 2007
Activists and global leaders used World Aids Day on Saturday to warn against complacency in fighting the disease and called on governments to fill a multibillion-dollar funding gap. ”We have made tangible and remarkable progress on all these fronts. But we must do more,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.
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/ 1 December 2007
There has been great progress in the response to the challenge of HIV/Aids and few setbacks, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Saturday. Speaking at World Aids Day commemorations in Mokopane, Limpopo, Tshabalala-Msimang pointed out that the setbacks have been in the area of research.
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/ 1 December 2007
A deadline for Ethiopia and Eritrea to agree on the physical demarcation of their border expired on Saturday amid escalating tension between the two nations, leaving the frontier only delineated on maps. For now, analysts expect no military movement in the ground, although rival troops are eyeballing each other near their 1 000kmf border.
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/ 1 December 2007
Iran was not to blame for the disappointment expressed by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana after key talks in London on the nuclear crisis failed, chief negotiator Saeed Jalili said on Saturday. Solana said on Friday he was ”disappointed” after the last-ditch talks in London failed to produce a breakthrough.
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/ 1 December 2007
Activists on Saturday sought to keep the battle against HIV in the public eye on World Aids Day in the face of growing complacency amid progress in treating and slowing the spread of the disease. The December 1 event is traditionally a time of grim stocktaking as Aids campaigners sound the alarm over the disease’s rampage through Africa.
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/ 30 November 2007
Chadian anti-government rebels on Friday declared a ”state of war” against French and foreign military forces in an apparent warning to a European Union peacekeeping force that plans to deploy there soon. French troops and aircraft are stationed in Chad under a bilateral defence accord.
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/ 30 November 2007
The Burma junta has shut down a Rangoon monastery which served as a hospice for HIV/Aids patients and expelled its monks, an opposition lawyer said on Friday. United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari criticised the closure of the monastery, that was used as a hospice for for people living with HIV/Aids.
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/ 30 November 2007
India might be painted as a pollution-spewing, global-warming economy of one billion people but it is also one of the world’s biggest wind power users, part of a focus on renewable energy mostly unnoticed in the West. Years of tax incentives have helped make India one of the fastest-growing markets for wind power, a major component of renewable energy.
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/ 30 November 2007
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Ethiopia next week for meetings on the conflicts in the volatile African Great Lakes region and Sudan and Somalia, said the State Department on Thursday. Rice, a rare visitor to the African continent, will make her third trip to sub-Saharan Africa since becoming Secretary of State in 2005.
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/ 29 November 2007
A British teacher accused of insulting Muslims after her class called a teddy bear Mohammad spent more than five hours behind closed doors in a Khartoum courtroom on Thursday as a judge heard the case against her. She was arrested and charged after one of the school staff reported her to the authorities.
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/ 29 November 2007
Côte d’Ivoire government troops and rebels controlling the country’s north will start to disarm by December 22 before forming a new national army, a foreign peace mediator said on Thursday. The announcement was made by an aide to Djibril Bassole, Foreign Affairs Minister of neighbouring Burkina Faso.
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/ 29 November 2007
Overtaken as the largest funder of global HIV/Aids programmes, the World Bank is now focusing on easing the economic damage inflicted by the syndrome in Africa and finding ways of controlling its spread through better prevention, care and treatment. Global funding for HIV/Aids reached -billion in 2007 compared to ,6-billion available in 2001.
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/ 28 November 2007
Chadian rebels warned a European Union peacekeeping force bound for eastern Chad on Wednesday not to side with President Idriss Déby Itno, saying they would fight it as a foreign occupation army if it did so. The warning from the rebel Assembly of Forces for Change followed the biggest battle in months in eastern Chad.
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/ 28 November 2007
It’s hard to see the looming threat of war with Ethiopia as you walk Eritrea’s tree-lined boulevards or enter its Italian-style cafes. But beneath the Eritrean capital’s tranquil surface, many Eritreans say they are worried about a repeat of the 1998 to 2000 border war that killed about 70 000 people.
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/ 28 November 2007
More than one billion trees have been planted around the world in 2007, with Ethiopia and Mexico leading in the drive to combat climate change, a United Nations report said Wednesday. The Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme said the mass tree planting will help mitigate effects of pollution and environmental deterioration.
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/ 28 November 2007
The Sudanese government is putting up obstacles to the deployment of a 26 000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur that could destroy the effectiveness of the joint United Nations-African Union mission, the United Nations peacekeeping chief warned on Tuesday.
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/ 28 November 2007
Australia’s Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd arrived in the nation’s capital on Wednesday to choose his new Cabinet, aides said, as outgoing John Howard and his vanquished team cleared out their desks. Rudd (50) stormed to power in a landslide election victory on Saturday that wiped out Howard’s conservative government after almost 12 years in office.
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/ 27 November 2007
Internationally sponsored talks over the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo were deadlocked on Tuesday, after Kosovo Albanian leaders rejected Serbia’s proposal for self-governance. Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population wants to break all ties with Serbia.
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/ 27 November 2007
The mayor of war-wracked Mogadishu has banned Somali media from publishing interviews with government opponents, or reporting on military operations and the city’s refugee exodus, journalists and watchdogs said on Tuesday. The measures announced by mayor and former warlord Mohamed Dheere put further pressure on journalists.