Barack Obama delighted environmentalists by deciding that he would, after all, attend the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen next month (he had already scheduled a trip to Oslo to pick up the Nobel peace prize). Mr Obama will offer provisional cuts to the United States’ emissions of an initial 17% from 2005 levels by 2020. Congress, which is stalled on a similar proposal, would need to agree. China is sending Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, to Copenhagen, where he is expected to pledge to reduce China’s “carbon intensity”. [26/11]
There was some good news on AIDS. A UN report said the rate of new HIV infections is down by 17% compared with 2001, and the death rate from the disease has dropped by 10% over the past five years. The ubiquity of antiviral drugs is one important reason for the improvement. [26/11]
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said he would suspend building Jewish settlements on the West Bank for ten months in a bid to restart peace negotiations with the Palestinians. But his offer excluded East Jerusalem, “natural growth” in existing settlements and buildings already under construction. Not good enough, said the Palestinians. [26/11]
Not for the first time, it was reported that an agreement was near that would see the release of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured by the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas three years ago, in exchange for several hundred Palestinian prisoners. [26/11]
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran visited South America. In Brazil he was hugged by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who called on Western nations to drop their threats of punishment over Iran’s nuclear programme but urged Iran to negotiate a “just and balanced” solution that met the West’s concerns. In both Brazil and Venezuela, where he met Hugo Chávez, there were protests against his visit. [26/11]
Most reactions to the choices for the European Union’s top jobs were negative, as few had ever heard of Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian prime minister who is to be first permanent president of the European Council, or Catherine Ashton, a British commissioner who is to be EU foreign-policy supremo. Some said their invisibility was the whole point. [26/11]
In Kabul, Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as Afghanistan’s re-elected president, after a controversially flawed election in August. Apparently in response to international pressure, his officials announced the formation of a force to fight corruption, to work with the FBI and Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency. [19/11]
A new report on Iran’s nuclear work by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear guardian, doubted Iran’s claim that a newly discovered uranium-enrichment plant being built inside a mountain near Qom is a recent, stand-alone civilian site. Building started five years earlier than Iran claims, so inspectors worry that there could be other hidden sites to support this one. [19/11]
Barack Obama paid his first visit to China, where he held talks with his counterpart, Hu Jintao, and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao. A “town-hall meeting” in Shanghai was attended by only carefully vetted young people, and no questions were permitted at a joint press conference by Mr Obama and Mr Hu. A long joint statement promised co-operation on trade, climate change and a range of other issues. But there were no breakthroughs. [19/11]
Fighting intensified in northern Yemen, with Saudi forces blockading the northern coast and helping their Yemeni counterparts to attack rebels loyal to the Houthi clan. [19/11]
Saudi Arabia got more deeply involved in the civil war in northern Yemen. It said its navy was blockading the northern strip of Yemen’s Red Sea coast in an effort to stop weapons reaching rebel Yemeni Shias, who have recently been attacking both Yemeni and Saudi government forces. [12/11]
Mr Obama delayed his decision about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan until after Hamid Karzai’s inauguration on November 19th. America’s envoy in Kabul wrote to the president opposing a troop surge, until Mr Karzai can prove he has tackled corruption. [12/11]
On the eve of Barack Obama’s first presidential trip to Asia, America said its special envoy would soon go to North Korea to try to get stalled six-party talks on nuclear disarmament going again. Separately, boats from North and South Korea exchanged fire near their disputed maritime border. [12/11]
Radovan Karadzic entered the dock for the first time at his war-crimes trial in The Hague. Previously the former Bosnian Serb leader, who is defending himself, had refused to appear as he does not accept the court’s legitimacy. [05/11]
The prosecution opened its case against Radovan Karadzic at the start of his trial for war crimes before a tribunal in The Hague. The former Bosnian Serb leader stands accused on 11 charges, including genocide for the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica in 1995. He outraged his alleged victims by refusing to leave custody and attend the proceedings. [29/10]
A majority of countries on the UN’s Human Rights Council voted for a resolution to send its Goldstone report on the Gaza war to the UN Security Council for possible referral to the International Criminal Court. The United States and five other countries voted against the resolution, which was critical of Israel. Unusually, Britain and France withheld from voting. [23/10]
Politics
