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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.
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/ 27 November 2007
Ethiopia has boosted its defence budget by more than -million to gird for a possible resumption of hostilities with Eritrea over their disputed border, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told Parliament on Tuesday. ”Our military budget has been raised proportionally from three billion to 3,5-billion birr [a rise of 16,7%, equivalent to ,3-million],” Meles said.
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/ 27 November 2007
China on Tuesday voiced deep concern about the safety of its peacekeepers in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region after rebel groups boycotting the peace process declared they were not immune from attack. ”Up to now there has been no incident, but we are deeply concerned about the matter,” the Chinese ambassador to Khartoum, Li Cheng Wen, said.
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/ 27 November 2007
Leaders of Côte d’Ivoire were to meet on Tuesday with President Blaise Compaore of neighbouring Burkina Faso to fine-tune details of a peace deal brokered by him. Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and his Prime Minister Guillaume Soro will travel to Burkina Faso to discuss and sign supplemetary sections to the peace accords.
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/ 27 November 2007
Soldiers and rebels have both claimed to have killed several hundred of their opponents in combat on Monday in eastern Chad. The battles at Abougouleigne left ”several hundred [rebels] dead, several injured and several prisoners of war”, according to the statement from the army’s general staff.
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/ 27 November 2007
People around the world are preparing for floods, droughts and other natural disasters in ways largely dictated by wealth and poverty as evidence of climate change mounts, a United Nations report said on Tuesday. Even if countries took steps to cut greenhouse gases, temperatures would continue to rise until 2050 due to accumulated carbon emissions.
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/ 26 November 2007
In 2005 I spoke to a traumatised filmmaker who had returned from the Democratic Republic of Congo where he interviewed a 19-year-old woman who 18 months before had been raped by 49 soldiers, one after the other. The pregnant teenager was then shot in the belly by the soldiers, killing her baby and rendering her sterile, writes journalist Charlene Smith.
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/ 26 November 2007
Serbia will not give up ”an inch” of Kosovo, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Monday as talks on the breakaway province’s future entered a critical phase before a United Nations deadline next month. ”Serbia will not let an inch of its territory be taken away,” a defiant Kostunica told reporters.
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/ 26 November 2007
A senior United Nations official has called on armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) troubled Nord Kivu region to lay down their arms and reintegrate into the regular army, a statement said on Monday. Intense fighting has been shaking eastern Nord-Kivu province near the border with Rwanda for weeks.
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/ 26 November 2007
Kenya has offered asylum to nearly two dozen Somali refugees, yielding to opposition to its plans to deport them to violence-torn Mogadishu, officials said on Monday. A military truck transported the 22 refugees from Nairobi to Kenya’s north-eastern Dadaab refugee camp on Saturday after the government dropped plans to deport them.
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/ 26 November 2007
A rising tide of travellers seeking out the new frontier of Egyptian tourism is threatening priceless rock art preserved for millennia in one of the most-isolated reaches of the Sahara. In Egypt’s south-west corner, straddling the borders of Sudan and Libya, the elegant paintings of prehistoric man and beast in the mountains of Gilf Kabir and Jebel Ouenat are as stunning in their simplicity as anything by Picasso.