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The West African regional bloc Ecowas has told incumbent Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo to stand down or expect to face "legitimate force". Ecowas said after its summit in Abuja, Nigeria, that it would send an envoy to the country to meet Mr Gbagbo. It would also convene a meeting of defence ministers to plan military action if he refused to back down, it said. Before the talks, Nigerian Foreign Minister Odein Ajumogobia ruled out a power-sharing arrangement between the rivals like those set up in Kenya and Zimbabwe following disputed elections. The BBC's Thomas Fessy in the main city Abidjan says the pressure from Ecowas has not come as a surprise, and means that Mr Gbagbo is now definitely boxed in on all sides. The Ecowas chairman, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan , has already written personally to Mr Gbagbo to ask him to step down, and offered him refuge. There have been suggestions that member nations send in troops to strengthen the presen...

A rescue package similar to that introduced after the global financial crisis is urgently needed to halt the worldwide loss of biodiversity, which is resulting in a heavy human cost, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed talking at a high level UN meeting on Wednesday. “We are bankrupting our natural economy,” he told a high-level General Assembly event on biodiversity, held at United Nations Headquarters in New York. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), ecosystems – and the biodiversity that underpins them – generate services worth trillions of dollars, supporting livelihoods around the world. Characterizing ecosystems as “our natural capital,” Mr. Ban stressed that a loss of biodiversity can lead to the failure of crops, a drop in profits, a deepening of poverty and economic decline. “Allowing [our natural infrastructure] to decline is like throwing money out of the window,” he said. According to the UN, the world will not meet the 2010 target to slow the decline i...

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, has opened the annual UN General Assembly summit  with a plea to the presidents, prime ministers and kings to use their power to meet UN goals to help the world's poorest by 2015. Ten years after world leaders set the most ambitious goals ever to fight & check global poverty, they gathered again on Monday to spur action to meet the deadline - which the UN says will be difficult, if not impossible, in some cases. For centuries, the plight of the world's poor had been ignored but with the turn of the new millennium, leaders pledged to begin tackling poverty, disease, ignorance and inequality. Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, made an impassioned plea to developed countries to join his country in raising its contribution to meet the millennium goals. France, he said, would increase its contribution by 20 per cent over the next three years. "We have no right to do less than what we have decided to do," Sarkozy told the...