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/ 25 November 2007
Incoming Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, has pledged closer Australian ties with overseas allies and unity at home after ending 11 years of conservative rule under John Howard. Rudd (50) has promised to pull Australian troops out of Iraq and sign the Kyoto Protocol.
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/ 24 November 2007
Selina Akello sits in a clearing between the mud huts in her village. ”I will tell you anything,” she says. An older man passes within earshot, but she does not falter. This conversation would have been impossible a few years ago; Akello has the disease that used to be called ”slim” because people wasted away. Now it is called HIV/Aids.
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/ 24 November 2007
Lebanon edged closer to chaos on Friday when President Emile Lahoud ordered the army to take charge of security after political rivalries blocked the election of his successor hours before his term expired. The pro-Syrian head of state said the country risked descending into a state of emergency.
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/ 23 November 2007
The Commonwealth’s biennial summit opened on Friday in Uganda with leaders focusing on climate change, a day after Pakistan, which is still under emergency rule, was suspended from the organisation. The loose federation of mostly former British colonies includes some of the world’s major polluters.
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/ 23 November 2007
World oil prices fell on Friday after a momentous week that saw record peaks close to $100 as traders worried about tight energy supplies and geopolitical jitters in key producer countries. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for January delivery, sank 95 cents to $96,34 per barrel. The contract had hit an historic $99,29 on Wednesday.
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/ 23 November 2007
Explosions and machine-gun fire echoed through the hills of east Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Friday, as government troops battled rebels for a third day amid a worsening humanitarian crisis that has displaced nearly 200 000 people in the past few months, a United Nations military spokesperson said.
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/ 22 November 2007
It may only be a short walk from its bustling neighbour Sake, but Kimoka is a ghost town. Homes are abandoned, the school is deserted and the brand-new church empty. Light streams in through the open door on to huge leather drums beside the pulpit. When the congregation fled, the drums became redundant.
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/ 22 November 2007
United Nations peacekeepers will help the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) army disarm eastern dissident groups by force in violence-plagued North Kivu province, UN and Congolese commanders said. Army soldiers and fighters loyal to renegade Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda clashed again on Thursday a few kilometres from Rutshuru.
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/ 22 November 2007
Lack of proper toilet facilities and sanitation kills almost two million people a year, most of them children, the World Toilet Association said at its first meeting on Thursday. ”It is regrettable that the matter of defecation is not given as much attention as food or housing,” said Sim Jae-duck, the association’s South Korean head.
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/ 22 November 2007
Holding up a grubby, worn banknote, the ex-rebel fighter points proudly to an image famous across Eritrea — defiant liberation soldiers raising a flag on a mountain peak. It’s 10 years this month since Africa’s youngest nation enthusiastically launched its own currency in November 1997, the nakfa.
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/ 22 November 2007
The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into Taliban hands, according to a report by an independent think tank with long experience in the area. There is no sign of any move within Nato to send reinforcements to Afghanistan.
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/ 22 November 2007
Fighting flared in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s powder keg east on Wednesday, as the army battled insurgent troops after killing 20 rebel soldiers who staged a pre-dawn attack. Men loyal to cashiered general Laurent Nkunda launched a raid on an army position near Rutshuru, the headquarters of an eponymous district in the troubled Nord-Kivu province.
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/ 21 November 2007
South Africa was experiencing a possible decline of new HIV infections, Health Director General Thami Mseleku said on Wednesday. Speaking on the same day as the release of a United Nations report stating that South Africa had the highest prevalence of HIV in the world, Mseleku said there were signs that there was a turnaround in the number of new infections.
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/ 21 November 2007
Eritrea said on Wednesday arch-foe Ethiopia had ”long since declared war” on Asmara by refusing to implement a five-year-old border ruling marking their shared frontier. Analysts and diplomats fear heightened tensions on the Horn of Africa rivals’ frontier could erupt into a new conflict seven years after they fought a war.
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/ 21 November 2007
A former child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war was named an ambassador for the United Nations children’s agency on Tuesday, vowing to be an advocate for children worldwide, not just in African war zones. Ishmael Beah lost his family in a rebel attack at about age 12 and and was forced to fight a deadly war.
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/ 21 November 2007
China has committed to sending an engineering unit of peacekeepers to Darfur at the end of the week, the top United Nations peacekeeping official said on Wednesday. China has about 1 800 peacekeepers deployed abroad, making it the second-largest contributor after France.
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/ 21 November 2007
The Guinea Bissau Cabinet on Tuesday sacked heads of the national radio and television on Tuesday for allegedly failing to send reporters to cover an address by the president. But the two denied claims their teams were not at the event and strongly protested their dismissal as too severe.
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/ 21 November 2007
More than three-quarters of Aids-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa — and South Africa is now officially the country with the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. The South African government currently estimates about 5,5-million of the country’s 48-million people are living with the disease.
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/ 20 November 2007
The number of Somalis uprooted by fighting in their own country has hit a ”staggering” one million, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said 600 000 people are believed to have fled Somalia’s lawless capital, Mogadishu, since February.
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/ 20 November 2007
South Africa urged rich countries on Tuesday to provide the hardware required for the deployment of a hybrid United Nations-Africa peacekeeping force in the strife-torn Darfur region of western Sudan. The Darfur conflict between rebels and a pro-government militia has claimed an estimated 200 000 lives in the past four years.
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/ 20 November 2007
Aid workers are calling it Africa’s biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia. The slender 23-year-old’s son Mohamed died of hunger. So did her daughter Isha. ”I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet,” she says, gently cradling the wizened face of Muhiadeen, her four-month-old son.
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/ 20 November 2007
Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) said on Tuesday it would push ahead with talks to end two decades of conflict with the government despite the expulsion of some of its fighters. The LRA is notorious for its brutal methods of attacking civilians, slicing body parts off survivors and kidnapping children to serve as fighters and sex slaves.
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/ 20 November 2007
No prizes for guessing the least popular and most hassled men at Camp Striker near Baghdad. That would be the staff at Magic Island Technologies, who last week switched off the camp’s free wi-fi internet access. It may surprise to some to know that there is any internet access at an army camp inside a warzone.
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/ 20 November 2007
An internal United Nations report has alleged that bodyguards protecting powerful Afghan politicians opened ”indiscriminate fire” on a crowd in the aftermath of a suicide bombing two weeks ago, killing dozens of people including women and children.
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/ 20 November 2007
A commander and several fighters from Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have deserted the movement to escape a treason probe for allegedly collaborating with the government, a spokesperson said on Monday. The group fled in October from the LRA’s hideout along the Sudan-Democratic Republic of Congo border.
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/ 20 November 2007
Urgently needed supplies of food, water and medicine were on Tuesday nearing people in remote areas of Bangladesh where a devastating cyclone has left millions homeless and thousands dead. With roads now cleared of hundreds of trees that had blocked aid convoys, officials said relief was finally starting to get through to the most inaccessible areas.
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/ 20 November 2007
The United Nations has slashed its estimates of how many people are infected with HIV/Aids, from nearly 40-million to 33-million. In a report to be issued on Tuesday, the UN says revised estimates on HIV in India account for a large part of the decrease.
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/ 19 November 2007
Former Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan was formally detained and charged on Monday with war crimes and crimes against humanity by Cambodia’s United Nations-backed genocide tribunal, a court spokesperson said. "The co-investigating judges have detained him for a period of one year," tribunal spokesperson Reach Sambath said.
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/ 19 November 2007
Chinese Defence Minister General Cao Gangcuan on Monday pledged to help Kenya modernise its armed forces during talks with President Mwai Kibaki, an official statement said. Kibaki said the ”support would not only improve the forces’ ability to ensure security along the borders but also enhance Kenya’s role in peacekeeping activities in Africa and beyond”.
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/ 19 November 2007
Africa is the ”forgotten continent” in the fight against climate change and needs help to cope with projected water shortages and declining crop yields, the United Nations’s top climate change official said on Sunday. Yvo de Boer said that damage projected for Africa by the UN climate panel would justify tougher world action to slow global warming.
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/ 19 November 2007
South Africa is a leader in how human rights issues are dealt with at the United Nations, the Department of Foreign Affairs said on Sunday. The department was responding to a Sunday Times report that the country’s human rights reputation was ”in tatters” after a series of ”sell-out” votes.
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/ 18 November 2007
Former southern rebels on Sunday accused Sudan’s president of ”threatening and calling for war” in speech he gave in honour of a government-allied militia charged with a string of atrocities. Pagan Amum, Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, said he deplored the comments by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.