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/ 21 September 2007
Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma on Friday embarked on his first foreign trip since taking office this week, heading to neighbouring Guinea and Liberia to promote ties damaged by more than a decade of war. The former insurance executive was sworn in on Monday within hours of being declared winner of a run-off election.
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/ 21 September 2007
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Thursday challenged the United Nations and its members to break their silence on two men he charged with war crimes in Darfur. Luis Moreno-Ocampo said too little attention had been paid to his arrest warrants, an issue not on the agenda of the talks.
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/ 21 September 2007
A request by the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for an official tour of Ground Zero while he is at the United Nations next week met a collective response that was classically New Yorker: Fuhgeddaboutit!
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/ 20 September 2007
Demining in Mozambique will soon get a boost with the arrival of more specially trained rats, local reports said on Thursday. Radio Mozambique said the international demining company Apopo will soon receive an additional 15 demining rats to add to its current furry workforce of 25.
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/ 20 September 2007
Britain will call on the European Union to extend sanctions against members of Zimbabwe’s ruling elite as the country’s humanitarian crisis plumbs new depths, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Thursday. He urged the international community to do everything it can to relieve human suffering in Zimbabwe.
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/ 20 September 2007
Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri urged Sudanese Muslims in a video posted on Thursday to fight a force of African Union and United Nations peacekeepers. Al-Zawahri accused Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of abandoning his Muslim brothers to appease the United States.
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/ 20 September 2007
A United Nations-backed Africa communications summit in Rwanda next month will seek to boost high-speed internet access to match the continent’s explosive growth in cellphones, officials said on Wednesday. In Africa, cellphones overtook fixed lines six years ago and now outnumber them nearly five to one.
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/ 20 September 2007
The South African Cabinet has welcomed the recent breakthrough by the collective leadership of Zimbabwe on draft constitutional amendments. Zimbabwe’s main political parties have reportedly agreed that President Robert Mugabe should no longer be allowed to handpick members of the lower house of assembly.
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/ 20 September 2007
A rebel leader from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region said his fighters defeated a government battalion on Wednesday in a three-hour battle that killed 45 people. Sudan Liberation Army faction chairperson Ahmed Abdel Shafie said one of his units attacked government soldiers stationed in the village of Dobow in the central Jabel Marra region.
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/ 20 September 2007
Lebanon mourned on Thursday an anti-Syrian member of Parliament whose assassination plunged the country deeper into crisis and threatened to derail efforts to elect a new president. Banks, schools and government offices closed a day after a car bomb killed Christian Phalange Party parliamentarian Antoine Ghanem.
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/ 20 September 2007
France on Wednesday called for a joint force of United Nations and European Union peacekeepers to protect civilians in parts of Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR) bordering Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region. It tabled a resolution at the UN Security Council for a mixed force in eastern Chad and the north-east of the CAR.
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/ 20 September 2007
The small plane banks steeply to the east and the extent of the floods in the low-lying Teso region of Uganda become clear: kilometre upon kilometre of low-lying pasture land submerged, tens of thousands of hectares of staple crops like cassava, millet and groundnuts waterlogged.
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/ 19 September 2007
It’s the kind of unfair situation that makes poorer nations wonder where the payoff is with free trade: demand for coffee, tea, cocoa, cotton and sugar — which is what many such countries have to offer the world — has risen. Prices paid in the supermarket have risen. Yet the share paid to the farmers who grow these basic agricultural commodities has fallen.
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/ 19 September 2007
The number of people affected by Africa’s worst floods in decades has risen from one million to 1,5-million, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Wednesday. ”Floods across Africa are reported to be the worst in decades in some places and extend in an arc from Mauritania in the west to Kenya in the east,” WFP said in a statement.
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/ 19 September 2007
Tiny fish swim beside the dugout canoes that residents use to escape their flooded homes, riding the water gushing through the streets of Soroti, an eastern Uganda town. Across Africa, torrential downpours and flash floods have submerged whole towns and washed away bridges, farms and schools.
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/ 19 September 2007
Thousands of children are being forced into armed service in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since fighting erupted between rebels and the Congolese army in North Kivu province in late August, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Wednesday.
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/ 19 September 2007
One of Darfur’s most powerful rebel leaders will not take part in peace talks until a lasting ceasefire is put in place and security is restored, he said in an interview published on Wednesday. Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur has refused to join Darfur rebel commanders and groups who agreed a joint position last month.
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/ 19 September 2007
Khmer Rouge ”Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s top surviving henchman, was arrested on Wednesday at his house on the Thai border and taken to Phnom Penh to face the United Nations ”Killing Fields” tribunal. Nuon Chea was arrested by a squad of Cambodian special forces soldiers, police and Western security guards.
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/ 19 September 2007
Scores of African scientists will be trained to develop crops for Africa’s conditions under a programme launched on Wednesday which is also aimed at keeping their expertise at home. Most African crop scientists have been educated at European or United States universities, and many stay there after graduation.
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/ 19 September 2007
South Africa is holding off joining a United States-led initiative to spread atomic power because it does not want to give up its right to enrich uranium, a senior South African official said on Tuesday. Exporting uranium only to get it back refined, instead of enriching it in South Africa, would be ”in conflict with our national policy”, said Minerals and Energy Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica.
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/ 18 September 2007
Maoists stormed out of Nepal’s government and vowed to disrupt upcoming elections on Tuesday after other parties refused to bow to the ex-rebels’ demand for the monarchy to be immediately abolished. In a blow to Nepal’s 10-month-old peace process, the ultra-leftists said they would stage street protests.
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/ 18 September 2007
United Nations agencies on Tuesday warned that the worst floods seen in parts of Africa for decades could intensify in the coming days and appealed for international aid to avert the threat of disease. About a million people have been affected by torrential rains stretching between West and East Africa since July.
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/ 18 September 2007
Russia expressed worry on Tuesday over the possibility of war with Iran as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner pressed for tougher sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov emphasised Russia’s "concern" over "multiple reports that military action against Iran is being seriously considered.
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/ 18 September 2007
Rwanda has made a thinly veiled threat to send its troops back into eastern Democratic Republic of Congo after accusing the government in Kinshasa of collaborating with genocidal Hutu extremists on its border. The Rwandan government said a Congolese army assault against a renegade Tutsi general, Laurent Nkunda, is helping to strengthen Hutu rebels.
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/ 17 September 2007
A council of peacemaking world leaders and Nobel laureates launched by former South African president Nelson Mandela is taking up Darfur as its first mission, with a trip to Sudan planned later this month, the organisation said on Monday. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chairs the group known as The Elders, will lead a delegation.
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/ 17 September 2007
France is to invest about €400-million in the next four years to help South Africa with service delivery, job creation and environmental and sustainable development, French ambassador Denis Pietton said on Monday. ”In terms of service delivery, we will help with providing development assistance,” the ambassador said in Pretoria.
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/ 17 September 2007
The humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe has become the world’s worst but is still largely ignored by the international community, a member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said on Monday. David Coltart said the crisis in the former British colony had far outgrown the ability of any single nation to tackle.
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/ 17 September 2007
Everything must be done to avoid the prospect of war with Iran, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Monday, a day after his foreign minister said the country should prepare for that possibility. The United States, Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China have backed two rounds of United Nations sanctions against Iran.
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/ 17 September 2007
Ministers from Africa’s Great Lakes region made little headway in two days of talks on security overshadowed by growing violence and mutual mistrust. Foreign and defence ministers from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) appealed for United Nations peacekeepers to intensify efforts to stamp out militias plaguing eastern DRC.
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/ 17 September 2007
Violence is increasing in camps for displaced people in Darfur, where nearly a quarter million people have been displaced so far this year, a United Nations report said on Monday. The United Nations said rising violence in the overcrowded camps of the remote region of western Sudan was making it harder to carry out humanitarian aid work.
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/ 17 September 2007
Somali leaders meeting in Saudi Arabia said they wanted to replace foreign forces backing the interim government against rebels with Arab and African troops under the aegis of the United Nations. The pact came days after a rival meeting in Eritrea by an opposition alliance that included leaders of the Islamic courts movement.
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/ 17 September 2007
Sierra Leone opposition leader Ernest Bai Koroma won the West African country’s presidential election after a tense run-off vote marred by some cases of fraud, the National Electoral Commission said on Monday. Koroma, a 53-year-old candidate of the opposition All People’s Congress, was declared the winner with 54,6% of valid votes.