UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised to step up efforts to end the four-year-old conflict on his first visit to Darfur today and urged the world to be more sympathetic to the millions of people whose lives have been uprooted.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon voiced optimism today for a peaceful resolution of Sudan’s conflicts as he headed to the south of the country to inspect progress in the peace deal between former southern rebels and the government.

ISRAEL yesterday said it would expel refugees from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region, touching off hot debate over whether the Jewish state, founded after the Nazi genocide, has a duty to take in people fleeing persecution.

MORE than 70,000 members of a hardline group held a rally in Indonesia that heard calls for a caliphate — a single Muslim government across the Islamic world.

Security forces restored a tense calm to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum today, a day after 36 people were killed in bloody riots sparked by the death of Sudanese vice president and former southern rebel leader John Garang.