The International Criminal Court has authorised a formal investigation into the violence after Kenya's 2007 poll.

Some 1,300 people died and tens of thousands were displaced as political differences snowballed into weeks of ethnic score-settling after the poll.

The ICC judges said that crimes against humanity may have been committed.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo requested the investigation last November, saying political leaders organised and financed some violence.

The EU has pledged $1.7bn (£1.1bn) in aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti and the US has offered $1.15bn at a UN fund-raising conference in New York.

The delegates are backing a $4bn plan by the Haitian government to rebuild infrastructure over the next 18 months.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon opened the meeting by calling for a "wholesale national renewal" of the Caribbean nation.

The 12 January earthquake killed 200,000 people and left one million more homeless.

The Haitian government and international officials have spent weeks putting together a plan for the country.

Six of the winning candidates in Iraq's elections should be disqualified because of alleged ties to the former Baath government, a vetting panel says.

If upheld, the move could alter the election result, to which State of Law coalition leader, Nouri Maliki, is already mounting a legal challenge.

Former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqiyya list won the election by two seats - too few to form a government.

A list spokesman said the suggested disqualifications would be illegal.

Unnamed officials from the Justice and Accountability Committee told the Associated Press (AP) news agency four of the six candidates belonged to Mr Allawi's Iraqiyya list, but none of the six was named.

Western governments risk creating a new generation of Islamist extremists if they continue to support repressive regimes in the Middle East, the former UN nuclear weapons chief Mohamed ElBaradei has told the Guardian.

In his first English-language interview since returning to Cairo in February, the highly respected Nobel peace prize-winner said the strategy of supporting authoritarian rulers in an effort to combat the threat of Islamic extremism had been a failure, with potentially disastrous consequences.

ElBaradei, who has emerged as a potential challenger to the three-decade rule of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, said: "There is a need for re-evaluation ... The idea that the only alternative to authoritarian regimes is [Osama] Bin Laden and co is a fake one, yet continuation of current policies will make that prophecy come true.

Sudan's opposition parties are set to decide this week on whether to boycott the country's April presidential and parliamentary elections.

More than a dozen opposition parties met on Wednesday to discuss a possible boycott after their calls for postponing the April 11 poll were dismissed.

Going ahead with Sudan's elections as planned would be a "disaster", the groups warned, saying it would be impossible to hold a fair and free poll by the scheduled date.

They also said many candidates have not been given the fair opportunities to carry out significant electoral campaigns in the volatile country. 

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain of production.  Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium economy in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?

The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three Afghan wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 years -- the CIA covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s (fueled at its start by $900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001, the U.S. invasion, occupation, and counterinsurgency campaigns. In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by its Afghan allies as the price of military success -- a policy of benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world's number one narco-state.

... To be "as rich as a Creole" was a familiar boast in Paris, and a substantial portion of the French economy depended on this one distant settlement. This was the jewel of the French empire, furnishing the coffee drunk in Paris, the sugar needed to sweeten it, and the cotton and indigo worn by men and women of fashion. Saint Domingue's commerce added up to more than a third of France's foreign trade. One person in eight in France earned a living that stemmed from it. By 1776, this tiny colony produced more income than the entire Spanish empire in the Americas.

But Haiti's superheated economy required constant, grinding labor in the plantations -- and that meant massive importation of human beings from Africa. ...

<...>

The money that kept the United States afloat during the long war for independence came from those enormous loans, negotiated by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams during their long stay in Paris. Does it not seem plausible that France had money to lend to one part of America because of the huge profits that another part of America -- Saint Domingue -- made possible?

<...>

We are naturally drawn to the most elevated part of the story of our national birth, and there is plenty of inspiration in the orations of Sam Adams, the immortal words of the Declaration, and the valor of American soldiers at Lexington and Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. But we do a disservice to the people of Haiti, and ultimately to ourselves, if we do not remember that a large contribution toward American freedom was made by the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans who, in their way, toiled and died for the cause. ...

... if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to push his luck on settlements or the peace process, he would do well to remember an unnerving precedent: Israel's loss, in 1967, of what had been a robust alliance with France.

The French-Israeli relationship began in the mid-1950s, when Israel became a major customer for the French arms industry. But the bond was not merely commercial: at the time France was trying to quash a rebellion in Algeria, and it shared with Israel a strategic interest in combating radical Arab nationalism. <...> French technical assistance helped Israel get nuclear weapons, and France supplied the advanced military aircraft that became the backbone of the Israeli Air Force.

<...>

This double game, however, ended when the Six-Day War in 1967 forced France to pick a side. In a shock to its Israeli allies, it chose the Arab states: despite aggressive moves by Egypt, France imposed a temporary arms embargo on the region -- which mostly hurt Israel -- and warned senior Israeli officials to avoid hostilities.

When Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on June 5, France condemned it -- even as Israel's nearly immediate aerial victory was won largely with French-made aircraft.

<...>

Like de Gaulle after Algeria, President Obama understands the strategic importance of improving relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds after years of bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...

Red States, Blue States and the Distribution of Federal Spending | Jeff Frankels Weblog

A virtue of the Tea Party movement is that many of its members are engaging in national politics for the first time.  It occurred to me that they might be able to use some help figuring out the lay of the land, and so I thought I would pursue a little research on their behalf.   The question is geographical redistribution:  which states receive subsidies from the federal government, and which other states are taxed to provide those subsidies.    One might be able to sympathize with the feeling of those living in the heartland of the country that they should not have to subsidize the northeastern states through, for example, federal housing programs.

It will come as a surprise to some, but not to others, that there is a fairly strong statistical relationship, but that the direction is the opposite from what you would think if you were listening to rhetoric from Republican conservatives:   The red states (those that vote Republican) generally receive more subsidies from the federal government than they pay in taxes; in other words they are further to the right in the graph.  It is the other way around with the blue states (those that vote Democratic).