SANAA: Somali pirates hijacked a Chinese commercial ship off Yemen's western port of Al-Hudaydah, Yemen's interior ministry said in a statement on Saturday. "Somali pirates attacked a commercial Chinese ship named 'Tien Hau' while it was 11 nautical miles off Al-Tair island in Al-Hudaydah province," said the ministry. The pirates "managed to capture the ship" and steered it towards the Somali coast, it quoted Al-Hudaydah coastguards as saying. An investigation has been launched into the fate of the ship and its crew, the ministry added without elaborating further. Heavily armed pirates using speedboats operate in the Gulf of Aden where they prey on ships, sometimes holding vessels for weeks before releasing them for large ransoms paid by governments or ship-owners.

TIRANA, ALBANIA: Thousands of Albanians converged on central Tirana on Friday demanding that the government step down over corruption allegations, two weeks after a similar anti-government demonstration turned violent and left three people dead. Protest marches were also being held in another three cities, including the town of Lezha northwest of Tirana, Vlora to the southwest and Korca to the southeast. The demonstrations come two weeks after three protesters were shot dead in clashes with security forces during anti-government protests in Tirana. Another 150 were injured in the violence. The opposition Socialists are demanding that conservative Prime Minister Sali Berisha hold early elections over allegations of corruption and vote rigging in the previous 2009 general election. But Berisha has refused to resign, accusing the opposition of trying to stage a coup. Tensions rose sharply last month when the country's deputy prime minister, Ilir Meta, resigned amid allegations...

YANGON: Myanmar's parliament named the premier of the outgoing military government as the country's new president Friday, handing a key junta member the top job in the post-election administration. The appointment of Thein Sein, 65, was the latest step in Myanmar's self-declared transition to democracy following elections in November, but critics have slammed the process as a sham aimed at cementing military rule. The military's delegates in parliament and their civilian allies hold an 80 percent majority in the new legislature, which handpicked the new president from a pool of three vice presidents named on Thursday. Thein Sein is the most prominent of the three and was seen as a shoe-in for the head of government. An upper house lawmaker, Khin Shwe, contacted inside the parliament said Thein Sein won 408 out of 659 votes. The future role of junta chief Senior Gen. Than Shwe, who has wielded absolute power since 1992, remains unclear. But he is expected to remai...

ALMATY: Kazakhstan's veteran leader has called a snap presidential election on April 3, about 20 months before his current term in office is due to end, a decree published in the official Kazakhstanskaya Pravda on Friday said. Nazarbayev, 70, has ruled Kazakhstan for two decades and is almost certain to win the snap election he called after rejecting a plan to let him rule Central Asia's largest economy unopposed until 2020. Nazarbayev, known as " Papa" to many Kazakhs, can run for an unlimited number of terms. Kazakhstan has never held an election judged free and fair by international observers. Many foreign investors, who have poured more than $150 billion into Kazakhstan during Nazarbayev's rule, rate the absence of a clear succession plan as the single biggest threat to political stability in the oil-rich country.

Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika said the country's 19-year state of emergency would be lifted "in the very near future". The state of emergency was installed solely in response "to the fight against terrorism" and was the only reason it could be upheld legally, he said. His announcement came amid mounting calls by members of civil society and opposition to lift the state of emergency.

Extracting the black gold buried beneath the South Atlantic will be hard. Spending the profits wisely will be harder Brazil's offshore oil Feb 3rd 2011 | CIDADE DE ANGRA DOS REIS | from PRINT EDITION Tweet THE coast of Rio de Janeiro is 290km and 70 minutes away as the helicopter flies. High overhead, gas is flaring; underfoot, enough oil to fill 330,000 barrels is waiting to be offloaded. The ocean floor is 2,150 metres beneath. Drill past 3,000 metres of rock and you will hit a layer of salt 2,140m thick. Only after boring through that fossilised ocean will you strike oil6.5 billion barrels worth in the Lula field alone. (Supposedly, it is named for the Portuguese word for squid, not the former president called Lula for his curly hair.)This is the Cidade de Angra dos Reis, a tanker refitted for oil production and storage, moored by 24 piles torpedoed into the ocean bed. It now pumps 14,0...

TULLY, Australia: Australia's biggest cyclone in a century shattered entire towns, pummelling the coast and churning across the country Thursday, terrifying locals but remarkably causing no known fatalities. Shaken residents emerged to check the damage after Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi hit land at around midnight, packing winds of up to 290 kilometres (180 miles) per hour in a region still reeling from record floods. Officials and locals said 90 percent of the main street in the small Queensland town of Tully, south of Cairns, had "extensive damage", while the coastal community of Cardwell also suffered "significant devastation". "There are people now that have lost their homes, they lost their farms, they have lost their crops and they have lost their livelihoods," Queensland state premier Anna Bligh said. Regional hub Cairns, a centre for foreign tourists visiting the Great Barrier Reef, was spared Yasi's worst with problems largely restri...