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...

JOHANNESBURG: From hosting lavish parties where sushi is served on models' bodies to quaffing rare whiskys, the display of wealth by South Africa's new black elite is raising eyebrows among the poor majority. The rise of bling culture, most noticeable among politically connected moguls, has prompted soul-searching in one of the most unequal societies in the world, with social activists equating it to "spitting in the face of the poor". The debate was fuelled by pictures on newspaper frontpages of the weekend launch party for a nightclub where sushi was eaten off the bodies of women clad in bikinis and champagne flowed all night. Businessman Kenny Kunene, a convicted fraudster behind the new club in Cape Town, has been lambasted by the ruling African National Congress ( ANC) for his latest show of wealth. The flamboyant entertainment and mining magnate has hosted similar parties in Johannesburg much to the anger of women's activists. "It is the sight o...

MELBOURNE: New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key has been slammed for describing British actress and estranged wife of Indian business tycoon Arun Nayar, Liz Hurley, as "hot". Women rights campaigners in New Zealand are infuriated over the 49-year-old prime minister's "sexist" comments on a radio sports show, online media reports said. Well-known women's rights campaigner Sue Kedgeley said remarks are "boorish". "They seem more like 1960s comments," she said. In fact, the sexist row erupted after Key was asked on the radio show if he would like to be Australian cricket star Shane Warne. He replied: "Yeah, well, given his current liaisons with Liz Hurley. I reckon she's hot." The father-of-two, who is married to his childhood sweetheart, Bronagh, went on to name the 45-year-old actress as a "definite" dream date. However, Key, who has two teenagers, Stephie and Max, said that in his dream date top three...

CANBERRA (Australia): An Australian soldier has been killed by an improvised explosive device during a patrol in southern Afghanistan, bringing the Australian death toll to 22. The acting chief of the defence force, Lt. Gen. David Hurley, said 22-year-old Corp. Richard Edward Atkinson was on his first deployment to Afghanistan. A second soldier was seriously wounded in the explosion in Uruzgan province, and is now in satisfactory condition at a military hospital in Tarin Kowt. "The entire Australian Defence Force and defence community is deeply saddened by the death of this fine young Australian soldier," Hurley said of Atkinson, who was engaged to be married. Australia has the largest military commitment in Afghanistan of any country outside NATO, with 1,550 Australian troops there.

MELBOURNE: Australia's worst ever cyclone 'Yasi' today hit the country's flood-ravaged northern Queensland province wrecking havoc and damaging houses. Yasi of category five was travelling at 29 km per hour and was estimated to be 150 km east north-east of Innisfail and 175 km east of Cairns. It was moving in a west-south-west direction. Innisfail Mayor Bill Shannon said he had already seen the roof torn from a building near the council chambers where 500 people are sheltering. "The eye is five hours away and it's already causing damage so it's pretty worrying," he said on the worst cyclone that hit the country since 1918. Cyclone Yasi's arrival has been pushed back until midnight Queensland time. The Bureau of Meteorology said, "The very destructive core of Cyclone Yasi will cross the coast near Innisfail close to midnight, accompanied by a dangerous storm time south of the cyclone centre." Damaging winds with gusts of 90 km per...

CAIRNS: A terrifying cyclone roaring towards Australia strengthened to the most dangerous threat level Wednesday, as officials warned it could be the deadliest storm in generations. As the winds that heralded Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi's arrival began battering hundreds of kilometres (miles) of Queensland coast, state Premier Anna Bligh told residents it was now too late to escape "the most catastrophic storm to ever hit our coast." Yasi was upgraded to a category five storm from category four as it menaced the populous east coast, where it was expected to hit around 10pm (1200 GMT) on Wednesday, the Bureau of Meteorology said. "This impact is likely to be more life-threatening than any experienced during recent generations," it said in an ominous warning that raised the expected strength of the looming storm. Yasi, packing a 650-kilometre (400-mile) front and an eye measuring about 35 kilometres across, was on course to slam directly into the area betwee...

KATHMANDU: Not ready to rest on his laurels, Apa Sherpa , the mountaineering legend from Nepal, will seek to best his own record on Mt Everest, the world's highest peak, by conquering it again this summer, for an incredible 21st time. The 51-year-old is returning to Nepal in April from his adopted home in Utah, the US, to take part in the Eco Everest Expedition 2011, an initiative by the Kathmandubased Asian Trekking agency. "Last year, Apa carried the banner of Nepal tourism board to the summit of Mt Everest to announce that Nepal will celebrate 2011 as its tourism year," said Ang Tshering Sherpa, chief of Asian Trekking. "This year, he felt he had to return to the peak to complete the work."

LAGOS, Nigeria: An Iranian charged with orchestrating an illegal arms shipment into Nigeria that contained mortars and military grade weapons pleaded not guilty Tuesday during a surprise court hearing. Azim Aghajani and his alleged accomplice, Nigerian national Usman Abbas Jega, both maintained their innocence against three charges over the shipment security agents discovered in October. Judge O.J. Okeke ordered the two men to be held by the State Security Service, Nigeria's secret police, until a Feb. 15 trial. Israeli officials initially claimed the weapons were bound for the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. But the intended final destination of the weapons appears to be Gambia, a narrow sliver of a country surrounded by Senegal, though Nigerian authorities initially said they believed the weapons were bound for politicians to cause unrest around the country's upcoming April elections. Prosecutors argued that Aghajani, who investigators accuse of being a member of Iran...