British royals to visit Morocco The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are to visit Morocco, Clarence House has announced.They will also visit Portugal and Spain in a ten-day tour later this month. The main themes of the tour will be trade and investment promotion, as well as climate change and the construction of low carbon economies. Algeria gives $100 million in aid to Tunisia Oil- and gas-rich Algeria has given Tunisia $100 million in financial aid to support its North African neighbor struggling toward democracy after an uprising ousted the country's longtime autocratic leader. Tunisian Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi announced the aid Wednesday, a day after returning from his first trip abroad, to Algeria and Morocco. The official TAP news agency carried the news. Four New York Times journalists are missing in Libya The New York Times has just announced that four of its journalists are missing in Libya. Among them: two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid; Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009 and rescued by British commandos; and photographers Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario. The team was last in contact with NYT editors Tuesday morning, covering the retreat of opposition forces from the town of Ajdabiya. Sudan Finance Minister Discusses Debts With U.S. Treasury The Minister of Finance and National Economy, Ali Mahmoud, Tuesday discussed with the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Middle East and Africa, Andrew Baukol, means for handling Sudan's foreign debts, lifting economic sanctions imposed on it and benefiting from the economic opportunities available in the two countries. The minister said that Sudan has met the technical conditions that qualify it to have its foreign debts written off through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative including Sudan commitments to implement the economic program and mapping out the strategy on poverty which, he said, is at its final stages. Bloody clashes in South Sudan alarm UK and Washington The International guarantors of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) have warned North and South Sudan leaders to stop armed confrontation and resume talks to resolve the political dispute over the border of oil-rich Abyei region. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and his Norwegian counterpart Jonas Støre spoke out following collapse, at the weekend, of talks between the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). Read more here. BM
