Wednesday December 07, 2011

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Idele Esterhuizen

Making headlines:

The world's three biggest polluters China, the US and India refused to move towards a new legal commitment to curb their carbon emissions, increasing the risk that climate talks will fail to clinch a meaningful deal this week. The European Union is leading efforts to keep alive the Kyoto Protocol, the world's only legal pact to tackle climate change, with a conditional promise to sign a global deal that would force big emitters to change their ways. But with the planet's biggest polluters digging in their heels, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon acknowledged the almost 200 nations meeting in the South African coastal city of Durban could struggle to strike a deal backed by legal force.

Zimbabwe police detained a leading media rights activist in what analysts said was a new crackdown on critics of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party before possible general elections next year. The Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe, or MMPZ, said its director Andy Moyse was arrested at his Harare office on charges of distributing subversive material, a day after the detention of two other MMPZ staffers in southern Zimbabwe under the country's tough security laws. The police searched the MMPZ offices for "material which comprises of DVDs containing Gukurahundi information", an MMPZ statement said, referring to a 1980s military crackdown in Zimbabwe's southern Matabeleleland and Midlands provinces when human rights groups say some 20 000 people were killed.

Egypt's new Prime Minister said that the ruling army would grant him extra powers, the State news agency reported, after critics accused the military of failing to give the last Cabinet enough clout. Kamal al-Ganzouri, who has been forming a "government of national salvation", said the army would issue a decree "within hours" to hand the premier "presidential powers except those concerning the judiciary and armed forces".

He did not give further details.

Also making headlines:
Cadre deployment has led to the government's intervention in three underperforming provinces under national government control, opposition parties said yesterday.
And, results in the Democratic Republic of Congo presidential election have been delayed for a further two days as returns have not been received from all polling stations, officials said.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.