UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Sunday began a Mideast trip to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and attend the opening of a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
Annan met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday and planned to travel to the West Bank yesterday for talks with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and other top officials.
Annan's spokesman said the UN chief offered to help coordinate peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.
Annan also is expected to meet with many of the 30 world leaders attending ceremonies today and tomorrow for the inauguration of the new Holocaust museum at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial. The presidents of Poland, Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, prime ministers of France, Italy and the Netherlands and several European foreign ministers are among the scheduled guests.
The trip will take on personal meeting for Annan as well. His wife, Nane, is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during World War II before disappearing.
Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for Annan, said that in his talks with Israelis and Palestinians, the secretary-general hopes to help both sides "sustain the momentum that has been generated in the past few weeks."
He cited the Feb. 8 Mideast summit in Egypt, where Sharon and Abbas declared an end to four years of bloodshed, and the international show of support for the Palestinians at a March 1 conference in London. At the conference, international donors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and other assistance to promote Palestinian reforms.
The UN is one of the "Quartet" of sponsors of the "road map," an internationally backed peace plan that stalled shortly after it was launched in mid-2003. The plan called on Israel to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank, while calling on the Palestinians to dismantle militant groups.
Nauru has started selling passports to fund climate action, but is so far struggling to attract new citizens to the low-lying, largely barren island in the Pacific Ocean. Nauru, one of the world’s smallest nations, has a novel plan to fund its fight against climate change by selling so-called “Golden Passports.” Selling for US$105,000 each, Nauru plans to drum up more than US$5 million in the first year of the “climate resilience citizenship” program. Almost six months after the scheme opened in February, Nauru has so far approved just six applications — covering two families and four individuals. Despite the slow start —
‘THEY KILLED HOPE’: Four presidential candidates were killed in the 1980s and 1990s, and Miguel Uribe’s mother died during a police raid to free her from Pablo Escobar Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot at a campaign rally, his family said on Monday, as the attack rekindled fears of a return to the nation’s violent past. The 39-year-old conservative senator, a grandson of former Colombian president Julio Cesar Turbay (1978-1982), was shot in the head and leg on June 7 at a rally in the capital, Bogota, by a suspected 15-year-old hitman. Despite signs of progress in the past few weeks, his doctors on Saturday announced he had a new brain hemorrhage. “To break up a family is the most horrific act of violence that
North Korean troops have started removing propaganda loudspeakers used to blare unsettling noises along the border, South Korea’s military said on Saturday, days after Seoul’s new administration dismantled ones on its side of the frontier. The two countries had already halted propaganda broadcasts along the demilitarized zone, Seoul’s military said in June after the election of South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, who is seeking to ease tensions with Pyongyang. The South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Monday last week said it had begun removing loudspeakers from its side of the border as “a practical measure aimed at helping ease
DEADLY TASTE TEST: Erin Patterson tried to kill her estranged husband three times, police said in one of the major claims not heard during her initial trial Australia’s recently convicted mushroom murderer also tried to poison her husband with bolognese pasta and chicken korma curry, according to testimony aired yesterday after a suppression order lapsed. Home cook Erin Patterson was found guilty last month of murdering her husband’s parents and elderly aunt in 2023, lacing their beef Wellington lunch with lethal death cap mushrooms. A series of potentially damning allegations about Patterson’s behavior in the lead-up to the meal were withheld from the jury to give the mother-of-two a fair trial. Supreme Court Justice Christopher Beale yesterday rejected an application to keep these allegations secret. Patterson tried to kill her
RSS