Australian ex-PM denies planning leadership bid (AFP)

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australia's ex-prime minister Kevin Rudd has again batted away suggestions he wants to retake the leadership, as his successor Julia Gillard flails in opinion polls a year after taking power.

Labor Party figures are reportedly furious that Rudd, who was brutally ousted by his then deputy Gillard in an internal coup, has given a series of interviews ahead of the one year anniversary of his dumping.

But asked whether he was plotting a comeback, Rudd, now foreign minister, told The Sun-Herald: "Nice try."

"I am set on being the best foreign minister I can be. But nice try."

Gillard led a backroom coup which removed Rudd in June 2010, and shortly afterwards called national elections which resulted in a hung parliament, losing Labor its clear majority.

After narrowly scraping back into power by securing the support of several independents and a Greens MP following 17 days of negotiations, Gillard named Rudd as her foreign minister.

Gillard said Saturday she felt "very secure" in her position, but the nation's first woman prime minister has experienced an unprecedented slump in the polls while Rudd remains popular with the public.

A Nielsen poll published Saturday put support for Labor at 27 percent -- the lowest first-preference share for a major party in the poll's 39-year history -- while dissatisfaction with the prime minister hit 59 percent.

Asked who they preferred as Labor leader, the survey of 1,400 voters overwhelmingly preferred Rudd, who scored 60 percent to Gillard's 31 percent.

But independent lawmaker Rob Oakeshott, whose support is crucial to Gillard's fragile hold on power, said there was no evidence that Rudd would make a leadership comeback.

"Kevin Rudd hasn't been on the phone to me, nor has anyone else," he said.

Oakeshott said Gillard had won his support and that of fellow independents during the long days of negotiations that followed the deadlocked polls and he would not guarantee Labor's hold on power if she was removed.

"My agreement at the time was with the chief negotiator who was left to negotiate by everyone in the Labor Party on her own essentially -- she successfully did that, and my handshake is with her," he told Channel Ten.

"If there is any move to change that, then quite rightly I, and I think the other crossbenchers as well, have the right to consider our options."

Labor Senator Doug Cameron denied tensions within the party, saying the prominence of Rudd, who swept to power in a 2007 landslide which ended more than a decade of conservative rule, was understandable given his position.

"If you're the Foreign Minister of Australia you will have a high profile," he told Sky News. "He's a man of ideas and he'll continue to have a high profile. I just don't think that will go away."

The conservative opposition seized on the reports of Labor divisions, suggesting in a new political advertisement that Rudd wants his old job back.

Opposition MP Christopher Pyne said the Queenslander's media prominence was no accident.

"I've been in this business for long enough to know that when a putative candidate for leader is constantly in the press they are doing everything they can to remove the current person in the job, not making their life easier," he said.

"The only thing Kevin Rudd hasn't done is ride a unicycle into Question Time blowing on a vuvuzela, demanding the leadership back."

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African free trade zone planning is under way (The Christian Science Monitor)

Freetown, Sierra Leone – Trade officials from across Africa met in Johannesburg this week to announce the formal start of negotiations toward a free trade zone that would stretch the length of the continent, incorporating more than 500 million people, 26 countries, and nearly a trillion dollars of economic output.

The proposed deal, which would eliminate many trade barriers between participating countries, would merge three existing trade blocs in eastern, central, and southern Africa. It would include Africa's two biggest economies (South Africa and Egypt) and its fastest growing (the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, and Botswana).

The project, which has been dubbed the “African Grand Free Trade Area,” is a bold idea, but not a new one. African leaders first made their plans for a 26-country trading bloc public at a summit in Uganda in October 2008. Since then, they have made little progress toward that goal.

RELATED: Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.

“We all know that this is a very long process,” says El Hadji Diouf, the executive director of the African Agency for Trade and Development, a Geneva-based think tank. “But an FTA like this would be a very good thing for the African community.”

“If they have strong political leadership, they will get there,” Mr. Diouf added. “I don’t think they have a choice: Development comes about through a better flow of trade.”

Commerce within Africa remains limited. Just 10 percent of the continent’s trade is conducted between African countries, while the rest goes overseas. That low volume is a result of Africa’s weak infrastructure, dense red tape, and corrupt border officials, among other challenges.

“Today, there are 40 to 50 barriers from one African border to another,” the prominent Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim told a business conference in Paris in March. “In such a context, it is obvious that if you carry perishable foodstuffs, they will be lost before you reach your destination. We need to break up those barriers and guarantee the free movement of people and goods."

Rob Davies, South Africa’s minister of trade and industry, said in a media briefing on Monday that the first stage of the “Grand FTA” negotiations will focus on eliminating tariffs and other traditional barriers to goods trade, while a second round will tackle more delicate issues such as intellectual property and trade in services.

a€?The timeframe for this is three years,a€

Once finalized, the FTA should be opened up to all of the continenta€™s regions, said Diouf of the African Agency for Trade and Development.

a€?It is important that this process doesna€™t exclude other African countries,a€

African nations are not alone in seeking out a regional approach to freeing up trade. Coalitions like Mercosur, the South American customs union, and ASEAN, the Southeast Asian economic group, are also planning to deepen and broaden their economic integration.

These robust regional forums contrast starkly with the 153-country “Doha Round” trade talks at the World Trade Organization, which are now limping into their second decade and have yet to produce any tangible results.

RELATED: Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.

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Population experts demand funding for international family planning (OneWorld.net)

LONDON, May 30 (OneWorld.net) - A high-level population conference has appealed to international donors to step up financial support for family planning and reproductive health services in developing countries.

This call comes at a time when foreign aid for international family planning is one of the most divisive topics for US Congress to resolve in its FY2012 budget considerations. The US is the key global donor in this field.

Described by its organizers at University College London as the largest conference on population issues to be held this year, Population Footprints examined the capacity of the planet to sustain a human presence which is due to reach seven billion in October.

The six billion threshold was passed just 12 years ago. Earlier this month, the UN published an upward revision of its long term projections of global population.

Academics, campaigners and politicians attending the conference from around the world discussed what strategies might encourage a lower population trajectory. They addressed the troubling contexts of food security, climate change, migration and a skewed demographic profile in which richer countries have too few people of working age whilst the poorer countries have too many.

The debates were marked by disagreements between the participants, a point acknowledged in the closing summary by Professor Anthony Costello, Co-Director of the UCL Institute for Global Health.

"That doesn't matter," he said, "because what unites us is much greater. What unites all of us is that funding for women's health, maternal health, child health, fertility reduction, family planning - all the drivers for moving towards a stable population - is desperately needed."

Describing current global funding as "derisory", Professor Costello deplored that "the World Health Organization has seen its budget halved for reproductive health and family planning."

A downward trend in this area of funding was indeed a feature of the April compromise which saw Congress approve the US budget for FY2011. International aid for family planning and reproductive health was cut by 5% to $615 million.

The battle now turns to FY2012. President Obama's original request for $769 million will be subject to forces pulling strongly in both directions.

The objective to provide universal global access to reproductive health services by 2015 is included in the Millennium Development Goals, a set of commitments agreed by world governments.

There are 215 million women in developing countries with an unmet need for contraception. The cost of fulfilling this area of reproductive health alone is estimated at $3.6 billion.

Campaigners say that it is impossible to achieve the MDG target without significant new donor funding. They advocate that US support should rise towards $1 billion per annum.

However, many Republican members of Congress considered the FY2011 compromise to be too generous. They will press for further cuts for FY2012.

The UN Population Fund is a favored target. Its US support for FY2011 was slashed from $55 million to $40 million. Republicans are under lobby pressure to revert to the days of the Bush Administration when UNFPA was denied funding altogether.

The new Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, was a leading participant in the Population Footprints conference. Whilst he maintained a diplomatic silence on his budgetary relationship with the US government, Dr Osotimehin was unambiguous in his views about priorities for population policies. "If we protect women's rights, their ability to make choices, we will see a lot of difference in population," he told the conference.

The Ugandan Minister of State for Finance and Planning, Professor Ephraim Kamuntu, presented the same opinion in language designed to appeal to politicians, hard-pressed on delivering budgetary value for money. "We have done a study in Uganda which shows for every $1 you invest in reproductive health it saves you $3 eventually in health costs that result from non-spacing of children and complications in giving birth," he said.

Africa's rate of population growth is the highest of the world's continents, its numbers projected to double to 2 billion by 2050. But attitudes are changing, according to Eliya Zulu, Director of the African Institute for Development Policy.

"Unlike 15-20 years ago, more African people now want to limit their family size but they are not doing that because they do not have access to family planning," he said in a BBC World Service interview at the conference.

Several speakers referred to the long term decline in foreign aid for family planning. This trend was evidenced in a scrupulously factual presentation by Hania Zlotnik, Director of the UN Population Division. She demonstrated that, since 1996, donor assistance for family planning programmes has fallen by at least 50% in nearly all African countries.

"In most high fertility countries, contraceptive prevalence is increasing by less than 1% per year," she said. "At that rate it's going to take something like 30-40 years for them to meet the unmet need they already have."

Dr Mairo Mandara, a gynecologist from Nigeria, highlighted the extremes that exist in the poorest regions of the continent. In northern Nigeria, the average age at which girls are married is just 15. Only 3% have access to contraception. Nigeria's population of 158 million is the highest in Africa.

The Nigerian government has taken the initiative of embarking on its own programme of free family planning services. "Africa should fund family planning, not rely only on donors," Eliya Zulu told his followers on Twitter.

The share of funding between potential donors was not tackled in any detail but speakers were unwavering in their view of the priority for spending. Siri Tellier, former Director of UNFPA in Geneva, summed it up in population numbers: "the use of family planning will be the most important determinant in whether we go to 11 billion in 2050 or whether we go to 9 billion in 2050."

The Population Footprints conference was sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust and The Lancet medical journal.

* More Information:

Population Footprints - archived videos of the UCL conference

OneWorld Population Guide

OneWorld Gender and Development Guide

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U.S. Rep. Giffords planning to attend husband's shuttle launch

By the CNN Wire Staff STORY HIGHLIGHTSRep. Gabrielle Giffords has a brain injury from a gunshot to the head in JanuaryHer husband is Capt. Mark Kelly, commander of the April 29 space shuttle missionGiffords won't be making any public remarks while attending the launch (CNN) -- U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, recovering from being shot in the head in a January assassination attempt, is planning to attend the April 29 launch of space shuttle Endeavour that will be commanded by her husband, Capt. Mark Kelly, her spokeswoman said Friday.

Giffords' physicians will have the final word on whether Giffords will be able to attend the launch three weeks from now, but Giffords' congressional office is already making plans for her attendance, said her communications director, C.J. Karamargin.

Giffords, who is recovering at TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital in Houston, won't meet with the media or make a statement while she is at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the 36th shuttle mission to the International Space Station, Karamargin said in a news release.

After the launch, Giffords' staff is scheduled to discuss publicly her reaction to her husband's latest mission.

Kelly will be commanding a crew of four other Americans and one astronaut from the European Space Agency.

NASA has said the shuttle will be delivering equipment and spare parts for the station, including two communications antennas; a high-pressure gas tank; parts for Dextre, a robot attached to the outside of the space station; and micrometeoroid debris shields.

At a news conference last month, Kelly said his wife was doing "remarkably well."

"She's improving every day," he said, "and in the realm of brain injuries, that is very significant and pretty rare."

At the end of the news conference, Kelly was asked whether training for this mission was more challenging given the obvious distractions of his wife's recovery.

"I think it would have been really challenging if this was my first shuttle flight or if it was even my first flight as a commander of the space shuttle," said Kelly, who has flown three times before -- twice as pilot and once as a commander.

An Arizona Democrat, Giffords is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and she attended Kelly's most recent launch when he commanded the space shuttle Discovery in 2008. His upcoming mission is scheduled to be the last flight for Endeavour and the next-to-last space shuttle flight before the fleet is retired.

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