President Kufuor was sharing his thoughts on the way forward for Africa in the wake of the global food crisis that had sparked violent protests in some countries at a media interview in London. He arrived in London to participate in an international forum to discuss concrete ideas for drawing on the power of business to help speed up progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The forum hosted jointly by United Kingdom Government and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), was attended by Chief Executive Officers of some of the world’s leading companies including Coca Cola, Microsoft, Standard Chartered Bank, Citi Bank, Pepsi, Barclays Bank and Mitsui.

As the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill returns to the Commons on Monday, campaigners are preparing to use it as a battleground for reform of Britain’s abortion laws, 40 years after the termination of pregnancy was made legal.

Anti-abortion MPs are demanding a cut in the 24-week time limit on the ground that some babies are viable at 23 or even 22 weeks. The group, led by the Tory MP and former nurse Nadine Dorries, claims that the lives of as many as 2,000 babies a year could be saved by a reduction in the limit to 20 weeks.

Jim Dobbin, chairman of the pro-life group of MPs, said he would like to see the current limit halved. “We would like there to be a number of amendments where you can start from a lower limit, say 13 weeks,” he said.

Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said his group was supporting 20 weeks as a first step. “It gets a lot of people on board and gets us on the way,” he said. “We have to realise we are in for a very long battle here.”

The 6ft-high fence is intended to protect visitors to the World Heritage-listed island off Queensland from the 150 or so dingoes that roam its rainforests and beaches. A nine-year-old boy was killed by two dingoes on Fraser in 2001, and there has been a spate of attacks since, most recently in April last year, when a four-year-old girl was bitten.

The island is home to Australia’s purest-bred dingoes, and the £360,000 fence is unpopular with some local people, who claim the animals are harmless – and with tourists, who regard them as one of Fraser’s attractions. Now Aboriginal leaders have called for a halt to construction, saying that bulldozers have damaged sacred sites and burial areas.

But Gonzalez is, in fact, a mother of six. Her sister Angie Maquiran, two years older, has seven children. Together with the fathers, the pair are raising their families in a public park across the street from one of Manila’s oldest Roman Catholic churches, sleeping on the ground, their possessions stuffed into a small cart that marks where home is.

Maquiran says the priests at the church tell her that “children are riches, and the more you have, the more blessed you are.” But health officials and some politicians here say that the Philippines has too many poor mouths to feed, an overpopulation problem that condemns millions of children to poverty.

Population size is an issue of perennial debate in this predominantly Catholic country, which has seen its population jump to 92.5 million from 60 million in 1990. But the situation has become more acute amid this year’s global food crisis. With the price of rice soaring, the poorest Filipinos are faced with spending more of their minuscule incomes on food or going hungry.

Westpac said cash net profit was 1.84 billion dollars (1.74 billion US) in the six months to March, just beating market expectations of 1.8 billion.

Just as importantly in a climate where investors are jittery about the global credit crunch’s potential to cause a blowout in bad debts, Westpac said it was “appropriately provisioned for known risks”.

“While we remain cautious in terms of our outlook, I am pleased to say that we are in good shape to continue to support our customers and build the next phase of our growth,” chief executive Gail Kelly said.

Westpac’s losses from bad debts rose to 433 million dollars from 232 million during the reporting period, a significant increase but well short of the 980 million blowout reported by rival ANZ last week.

Rupel said during a foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg Tuesday that there is no point to holding up the talks. He said he believes there can be an agreement with Russia within weeks, with or without Lithuania.

Slovenia currently holds the EU presidency.

Lithuanian officials have said they want Moscow to first resolve what they call “frozen conflicts,” such as the dispute with Georgia over separatist regions. They also want Russia to resume oil deliveries through a pipeline to Lithuania’s only oil refinery.

Once hailed as a leader focused on Africa’s democratic and economic revival, Mbeki’s silence on Zimbabwe has been blamed either on misplaced loyalty or crippling deference.

A smiling Mbeki was photographed holding hands with Mugabe even as Zimbabweans had been waiting for weeks for the final results of a March 29 election.

He was further slammed for saying there was “no crisis” in Zimbabwe after meeting the 84-year-old Zimbabwean strongman two weeks ago.

“The election was a crisis (...) for everyone to see. He denied that was the case. He went against his own logic,” said Ebrahim Fakir, a researcher at the Johannesburg-based Centre for Policy Studies.

Susan Booysen, political analyst at the University of the Witwatersrand, put it bluntly: “One cannot come to any other conclusion than that he has botched (...) his legacy,” she said.

“People expected statesmanship. But at the end of the day, he didn’t have the guts to stand up to a fellow liberation movement leader,” referring to the pair’s shared background in anti-colonial politics.

Passionate debate over the ethics of aborting healthy babies preceded the Abortion Act that came into force in Britain in April 1968, and the issue is still hotly contested by the two sides.

“I used to — and still occasionally do — get lunatic letters comparing me to Herod and Hitler,” David Steel, the parliamentarian who introduced the Act, told Reuters.

Baitullah Mehsud, who has been accused of masterminding the December assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, ordered the cease-fire as part of an agreement that calls for prisoner exchanges and a withdrawal of Pakistani military forces from areas near the Afghan border.

The new government’s talks with Mehsud, which resemble past efforts to disarm Islamist groups through negotiations that ended in failure, mark the sharpest break yet with the hard-line security policy followed by U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf. U.S. officials expressed concern that negotiations with perhaps the country’s most notorious Islamist commander would fail to bring a lasting solution to Pakistan’s political tumult.