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/ 5 December 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf spent a second day in hospital on Wednesday with a condition some sources called very serious but an envoy said was a routine check-up for an old liver transplant. In a tumultuous week for Somali politics, an exiled Islamist leader rejected a call by Somalia’s new prime minister for talks to try to end 16 years of conflict.
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/ 5 December 2007
A jubilant Iranian leadership called on Tuesday for plans for new United Nations sanctions against the country to be dropped in the face of the United States report confirming it had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme. The report has forced America’s European allies to re-evaluate policy towards Iran on Tuesday.
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/ 5 December 2007
Democratic Republic of Congo troops entered Mushake, a strategic eastern village, on Tuesday after a second day of heavy clashes with rebel soldiers. ”Fighting is still going on in Mushake. We are conducting a search operation throughout the area before confirming the conquest of this position,” said Colonel Delphin Kahimbi.
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/ 5 December 2007
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Ethiopia on Wednesday for talks with African leaders aimed at tackling long-running conflicts in the volatile Great Lakes region, Somalia and Sudan. On only her second trip in two years to sub-Saharan Africa, Rice said she wanted to move international efforts forward to resolve those conflicts.
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/ 5 December 2007
After putting his seedlings to bed in the world-famous Banaue rice terraces in the northern Philippines, farmer Gabriel Balicdon works as a tourist guide and buys rice from the grocer. Built by Ifugaos — illiterate mountain farmers and woodcarvers — at about the same time the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China were being constructed, the terraces look like giant staircases leading to the clouds.
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/ 4 December 2007
The Somali government has frozen aid activities in a south-eastern region most affected by the country’s growing humanitarian crisis, a United Nations spokesperson told reporters on Tuesday. The new restrictions ban all humanitarian flights to the Lower Shabelle region’s airports, World Food Programme spokesperson Peter Smerdon said.
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/ 4 December 2007
A delegation of the world’s elder statesmen on Tuesday called for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan’s Darfur and for the international community to urgently honour its pledge to send in a peacekeeping force. ”The future of Darfur, and indeed the whole of Sudan, sits on a knife-edge,” said a report following a fact-finding mission.
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/ 4 December 2007
A 190-nation climate meeting in Bali took small steps towards a new global deal to fight global warming by 2009 on Tuesday amid disputes about how far China and India should curb rising greenhouse-gas emissions. Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’s top climate official, praised the December 3 to 14 meeting of 10 000 participants for progress.
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/ 4 December 2007
The United Nations says the humanitarian crisis caused by last month’s cyclone in Bangladesh is much worse than previously thought, with more than two million people in need of immediate life-saving assistance. ”As more information becomes available, an even grimmer reality is being revealed,” the UN said on Tuesday.
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/ 4 December 2007
The United Nations refugee agency on Tuesday warned that renewed fighting between government troops and rebels in eastern Chad has limited its access to refugee camps amid a heightened sense of insecurity. The fighting has not sparked any exodus but has ratcheted up tensions and worries among vulnerable sections of society, the UN said.
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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
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
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
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.