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/ 7 December 2007
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) representative for Somalia on Friday voiced his concern at the increasing number of rape cases in the country’s war-torn capital, Mogadishu. "Sexual violence and rape are part of the game now," Christian Balslev-Olesen said at a press briefing on the deteriorating access to health in Mogadishu.
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/ 7 December 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf said on Friday he was in good health after recovering from a bout of pneumonia, and laughed off a flurry of reports he was near death. ”I’m fine, I am OK,” Yusuf said in an exclusive interview from his hospital bed in Nairobi. ”I had pneumonia, but the doctors have taken it out [treated it] and I am well now,” he said.
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/ 7 December 2007
In the interests of the planet, delegates at a climate summit in balmy Bali have cast aside their collars and ties and donned airy clothing, prompting an explosion of batik shirts. Indonesia’s traditional wax-and-dye attire can be spied on every corner at the key United Nations meeting in Bali, a sultry holiday island near the equator.
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/ 7 December 2007
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that the new 26 000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur ”is at risk” unless it gets 24 critically needed helicopters and he appealed again to all countries for help. ”While helicopters alone cannot ensure the success of the mission, their absence may well doom it to failure,” Ban said in a letter.
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/ 6 December 2007
Charred bodies and burnt-out trucks still lie on the blackened grass in a valley in eastern Chad two days after the fighting moved further north. Columns of smoke rise up and drift across the smouldering plains beneath Tourka Mountain, a rocky outcrop near the border with Sudan’s Darfur region.
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/ 6 December 2007
Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said this week that Angolan soldiers have raped, beaten and tortured illegal Congolese migrant workers before deporting them across the border. The French humanitarian group said the rights abuses were occurring in the diamond-rich northern Angolan province of Luanda Norte.
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/ 6 December 2007
The cost of adopting responsible policies on climate change for global economies could be balanced by the creation of millions of "green jobs," the United Nations said on Thursday. In a statement, UN Environment Programme chief Achim Steiner called for a major boost to so-called clean industries.
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/ 6 December 2007
Somalia’s President Abdullahi Yusuf is recovering from bronchitis in a Nairobi hospital and will fly to Britain for a check-up on his liver transplant, the Somali ambassador to Kenya said on Thursday. Suggestions by some diplomatic sources that Yusuf was in a very serious condition were ”lies”, said envoy Mohamed Ali Nur.
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/ 6 December 2007
Robert Mugabe, a largely unwelcome guest of the European Union at a summit this weekend, is a hero in the eyes of many Africans for daring to stand up to the West and seize land from white farmers. Many in Europe have been left scratching their heads over how Zimbabwe’s president since independence still commands respect.
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/ 6 December 2007
Climate scientists from around the world urged delegates at United Nations-led talks in Bali on Thursday to make deeper and swifter cuts to greenhouse emissions to prevent dangerous global warming. In a declaration, more than 200 scientists said governments had a window of only 10 to 15 years for global emissions to peak and decline.
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/ 5 December 2007
The United States and Africa’s Great Lakes states agreed on Wednesday to rapidly strengthen Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) security forces in their drive against rebel and foreign forces. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave no details when she announced the agreement in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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/ 5 December 2007
Jubilant Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Wednesday said the United States report confirming his country had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme was a ”declaration of victory”. ”This was a final shot to those who, in the past several years, spread a sense of threat and concern in the world through lies of nuclear weapons.” Ahmadinejad said.
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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
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
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
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.