Africa rushes to find peacekeepers
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters):
African leaders scrambled yesterday to find 4,000 more troops for a peacekeeping force in Somalia, fearing failure to deploy could plunge the Horn of Africa country back into anarchy.
As the presidents met at an African Union summit, after defusing a damaging row over Sudan that could have derailed their agenda, the European Union released €15 million (US$19 million) to finance the peacekeeping operation. African officials say funding is key to the operation.
... Threat on Somali Islamist website
NAIROBI (Reuters):
A Somali Islamist website posted a message yesterday purporting to be from a new insurgency movement that vowed to fight a possible African Union peacekeeping force.
"Somalia is not a place where you can come to earn a salary - it is a place where you can die," said the self-styled 'Popular Resistance Movement' in a message to the would-be peacekeepers on the qaadisiya.com site. "The salary you are coming to look for here would be used to transport your coffin back home."
Ashura pilgrims attacked in Iraq
BAGHDAD (Reuters):
Bombers killed 36 people in two attacks on Shi'ite worshippers marking the religious ritual of Ashura yesterday amid heightened tensions between Iraq's Shi'ites and once politically dominant minority Sunnis.
Four more pilgrims were killed in an ambush in the capital on the final day of the week-long annual Ashura mourning rite, the highpoint of the Shi'ite religious calendar.
Also in Baghdad, mortars rained down on the mainly Sunni district of Adhamiya, killing 17 and wounding 72, a police source said.
Hamas commander killed, despite truce
GAZA (Reuters):
Gunmen shot dead a Hamas commander in the Gaza Strip yesterday and the Islamist group blamed a Fatah-dominated security service for the first killing in the territory since a ceasefire went into effect overnight.
Hospital officials in the southern town of Khan Younis said Hussein Shabasi was shot in the head.
A spokesman for Hamas' armed wing said he was killed by the Preventive Security Service, most of whose members belong to President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction. The security service denied any connection with his death.
Calderon says leftist bloc no worry for him
MADRID, Spain (AP):
Mexico's new President Felipe Calderon said yesterday he is not worried by the emergence of left-leaning nationalist governments in Latin America, insisting the region's countries can get along despite their policy differences.
"We have no fear at all. On the contrary, we think the plurality and diversity that exists among countries enriches Iberoamerica," Calderon said at a joint news conference in Madrid with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
On the presence of leftist presidents in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, the conservative Calderon said there was no reason that the region's efforts to gain strength through acting in unison should suffer because of diversity of political and economic strategy.
