Ivory Coast’s strongman leader Laurent Gbagbo holed up in a bunker defiantly maintaining he won the election four months ago even as troops backing the internationally recognised winner encircled the presidential residence.

THE African Union will ask the UN Security Council to suspend action for a year on an indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on Darfur genocide charges, Nigeria’s foreign affairs minister said last night.

Actor George Clooney has told the UN’s most powerful body that if it does not send peacekeepers to Sudan’s Darfur region millions of people would die in what he called the first genocide of the 21st century.