Jerusalem—US Middle East envoy George Mitchell
began a fresh trip to the region on Thursday
aiming to push Israelis and Palestinians to
agree to restart peace talks, but with few
expecting a breakthrough. The former senator was
to meet Israel’s president and foreign and
defence minis-ters on Thursday ahead of separate
talks on Friday with Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
Milan—The world needs to invest $83 billion a
year in agriculture in developing countries to
feed 9.1 billion people in 2050, the United
Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said
on Thursday. World agriculture needs massive
investments to raise overall output 70 percent
over the next 41 years, including almost doubled
output in the developing coun-tries to feed a
projected extra 2.3 billion people by 2050, the
FAO said.
Tokyo—Japan’s new
prime minister will seek to keep periodically
fraught ties with China and South Korea on track
at weekend summits, avoiding rows that could
hurt economic links and pitching his idea of an
East Asia re-gional grouping. A meeting of
leaders from China, Japan and South Korea in
Beijing on Saturday is also likely to discuss
what could come next for the regional partners
after North Korea signaled this week it could
return to nuclear disarmament talks.
Conakry—Guinea military
government has announced that it would form a
commission to investigate the recent shooting of
a rally by unruly protesters in the capital
Conakry. The commission will consist of
representatives from political parties, unions
and civic organizations besides military. The
government has asked all political parties to
nominate their representatives as early as
possible but no time-frame for initiating the
probe has been given at this stage.
ON maps, Crimea is Ukrainian territory, and
Sevastopol, a naval citadel on its southern
coast is a Ukrainian city. But when court
bailiffs tried to serve pa-pers at a lighthouse
here in August, they suddenly found themselves
surrounded by armed troops from Russia’s Black
Sea Fleet who delivered them to police as if
they were trespassing teenagers.
