Category: News

Obama, hosting India’s leader at the White House a week after visiting top global polluter China, said recent progress meant the world was “one step closer to a successful outcome in Copenhagen.”

Countries must “reach a strong operational agreement that will confront the threat of climate change while serving as a stepping-stone to a legally binding treaty,” he told a press conference with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Police on Mindanao island pulled bullet-riddled bodies from shallow graves after gunmen allegedly hired by a local political chief abducted then shot dead a group of politicians from a rival clan and accompanying journalists.

As thousands of troops fanned out across the ultra-tense Maguindanao province on Mindanao, President Gloria Arroyo declared a state of emergency for the area that would allow curfews and road checkpoints to be imposed.

The official refused to be drawn on what that target would be but indicated that Obama would announce it in the next few days along with a decision on whether he will fly to the Danish capital to give added impetus to proceedings.

Sixty-five leaders, including from Germany, France and Brazil, have already committed to participating in the meeting, which seeks a global treaty on tackling climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

“History shows us that if you set dates for when you’re going to leave, the enemy waits until you leave,” US Senator John McCain said at the Halifax International Defense Forum in easternmost Canada.

“I think benchmarks are important,” he said. “But if we set a date for when we are going to withdraw, I don’t want to go, if we are going to set a date so that the Taliban and others can just sit back and wait until we leave.”

The government also reiterated it would complete the resettlement of civilians by the end of January.

“We will allow complete freedom of movement,” senior presidential adviser Basil Rajapakse told inmates of the Manik Farm complex, the main facility housing displaced civilians.

The attacks brought to 35 the number of people killed since Karzai was sworn in for another five years on Thursday, pledging to try to bring peace to the nation and take over security from foreign forces in five years.

A suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck the capital of the southwestern province of Farah, killing 15 people near the governor’s home.

Karzai took the oath of office as the US-led war stretches into a ninth year, leaving record numbers of soldiers and civilians dead and with Taliban control extending deeper into the country after an election mired in fraud.

In a wide-ranging speech, he promised action on the worst problems that preoccupy his Western backers, who are weary after pouring more than 100,000 troops and billions of dollars of aid into Afghanistan with little in return.

The US leader also said Americans should not be “fearful” of the prospect that five men accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001 attacks will go on trial in New York City, a notion that has sparked vocal domestic opposition.

“Guantanamo — we had a specific deadline that was missed,” Obama told US-based NBC television, in one of a flurry of interviews he gave in Beijing as his Asia tour winds down.

Danish Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard described the meeting as “very constructive.”

Delegations included major greenhouse gas emitters, including China, the United States, India and Brazil, as well as several island nations and African states that are among the poorest in the world and most vulnerable to climate change.

TI’s annual corruption index showed how countries devastated by conflict have become overrun by graft with Iraq, Sudan and Myanmar accounting for the three other states in the bottom five of the chart.

The Berlin-based organisation said that countries whose infrastructure had been “torn apart” by conflict needed help from outside to prevent a culture of corruption taking root.

“A giant step is being taken today in announcing the opening of the major crime task force,” Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar told a news conference with the British and US ambassadors.

The government denied that the creation of the new entity was in response to huge Western pressure for concrete action to wipe out corruption.