NAIROBI, Kenya — Six months of peace talks to end more than two decades of conflict in northern Uganda have been virtually for naught, and their progress is now being held up by a simple question of geography. Bellicose rhetoric from Sudan President Omar al-Bashir that the Lord’s Resistance Army would be expelled from the south of his own embattled nation “by the end of this month” has emboldened the shadowy rebellion to demand a new host — and mediator — for negotiations to end the war that has made night travellers of tens of thousands of children and displaced [...]
Ever since Russia briefly interrupted natural gas deliveries to Ukraine on New Year’s Day 2006, Moscow has been harshly criticized in the West for allegedly using energy as a tool to blackmail its neighbors. The recent spat between Russia and Belarus over Moscow’s price hike on oil and gas deliveries to Minsk once again prompted charges from Western politicians and pundits that Russia is not a reliable source of energy. But where many Westerners perceive Russia as a regional bully, the Kremlin argues that former Soviet republics are not entitled to cheap Russian energy simply because Russia’s major export pipelines [...]
BANGKOK, Thailand — Astrology and superstitious belief are part of everyday life in impoverished Burma, where hope for every family hangs on some fortune-teller’s prophesy. But there is one prediction no one in the country is prepared to make — who will succeed ailing leader Than Shwe. Rumor is rife in Rangoon that the hardhearted general who cherishes his family life is seriously ill with intestinal cancer. His death or withdrawal from a position of influence is seen by some Burma-watchers as a small chance for a break in the long-running deadlock between the hard-line military regime and the suppressed [...]
