Afghanistan aid: Donors pledge $16bn at Tokyo meeting
Donors at a conference on Afghanistan have pledged to give it $16bn (£10.3bn) in civilian aid over four years, in an attempt to safeguard its future after foreign forces leave in 2014.
The BBC 8 July 2012
The biggest donors, the US, Japan, Germany and the UK, led the way at the Tokyo meeting in offering funds.
The pledge came as Afghanistan agreed to new conditions to deal with endemic corruption.
There are fears Afghanistan may relapse into chaos after the Nato pullout.
The Afghan economy relies heavily on international development and military assistance. The World Bank says aid makes up more than 95% of Afghanistan’s GDP.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan itself two roadside bombs killed 14 civilians and injured another three in the southern Kandahar province, regional police chief Gen Abdul Raziq said.
Libya elections: Polling station raids mar vote
Federalists in eastern Libya attacked several polling stations on Saturday as the country voted in the first election since last year’s revolution.
08 Jul 2012 06:56 – Marie-Louise Gumuchian
Although voting took place peacefully across much of the country, armed gangs in Benghazi stormed a polling station and set alight ballot papers. Two other polling stations were attacked, with one man shot in the arm.
There were similar incidents in the eastern coastal towns of Guba and Suluq, where fighters stopped ballot papers being delivered.
However, in the capital, Tripoli, and other cities thousands queued from 8am to vote, the overwhelming majority for the first time.
Libya’s last election took place in 1964 under King Idris al-Senussi, the monarch Gaddafi ousted five years later at the point of a rifle.
French WWI artworks preserved in caves
Most years while ploughing the fields on his farm, Jean Luc Pamart will discover a body. A lost soldier.
By Christian Fraser BBC News, Confrecourt
Thousands of French troops disappeared while defending the line on the banks of the Aisne in northern France during World War 1, and almost 100 years on their remains are still being uncovered.
So too the explosives: hand grenades that resemble potatoes. Recently a local farmer disturbed a gas canister and was forced to abandon his tractor.
These days the soldiers remains can be identified – such are the advances in DNA – and many of the bodies recovered are often returned to their families.
But this battlefield, at Confrecourt, unlike the Somme to the north, is rarely visited.
Cultural Exchange: Pablo Escobar’s allure persists
A Colombian telenovela about the narco, ‘Escobar: The Boss of Evil,’ has been sold to U.S. broadcaster Telemundo, and foreigners fill ‘Pablo tours’ in his hometown.
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
MEDELLIN, Colombia – The actor’s comb-over, the mincing walk, the flat speech cadence and murderous, reptilian glare are all too reminiscent of one of the most powerful criminals who lived.
The large number of Colombian eyeballs glued to a new prime-time telenovela about the life and times of Pablo Escobar, highlighted by actor Andrés Parra’s bravura performance, shows that the late drug narco still fascinates more than 18 years after he died on a Medellin rooftop in a shoot-out with police.
Australia laid on silver service for Bin Laden’s protector
The Pakistani spy was a dinner guest at Government House, and nearly Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Australia. He was also allegedly harbouring Osama bin Laden.
BEN DOHERTY July 8, 2012
WHEN Brigadier Ijaz Shah sat down to dinner at Government House in Canberra in June 2005, he was just one of Pakistani’s President Pervez Musharraf’s considerable entourage.
His military attire likely attracted little attention. His boss often wore army greens, and those present at the state dinner to mark the military dictator’s visit included the Governor General and former commander of Australia’s SAS, Major General Michael Jeffery, and the then Chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove.
Seeds of aid bear fruit in Kenya
Directly targeted aid is making a difference
DAVID RANDALL , MILENA VESELINOVIC SUNDAY 08 JULY 2012
On the perpetual conveyor belt of unpleasantness that is international news, occasionally there comes a parcel of hope. A year ago, we carried a picture on our front page that came to symbolise the severity of the famine in East Africa. It was of Zippora Mbungo, an 86-year-old Kenyan woman, who, in order to deaden the pangs of hunger enough to give her meagre rations to her grandchildren, bound her stomach tightly with rope. She was far from alone. “Only the rich people around here don’t tie a rope in times like this,” she said.
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