Opposition rejects unity government

HARARE - Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, rejected calls yesterday for a national unity government instead of a presidential runoff vote and said his party was sure to win the election despite government violence. Zimbabwe has suffered a de facto coup and is being run by a military junta, Tsvangirai said at a news conference. Some 66 supporters of his Movement for Democratic Change have been killed since disputed March elections, he said. Simba Makoni, a defector from the ruling ZANU-PF party and a former finance minister, said earlier that the June 27 runoff between President Robert Mugabe and Tsvangirai must be called off because a free and fair vote was impossible. (Reuters)

JERUSALEM - Indirect peace negotiations between Israel and Syria will resume next week, Israeli officials said late yesterday. Israel and Syria announced last month that they had been holding indirect talks through Turkish mediators for a year. Formal peace negotiations between Israel and Syria broke down in 2000. The Israeli officials spoke late yesterday on the condition of anonymity. They did not say exactly when the talks would resume or where they would be held. (AP)

The United Nations' top official in the global fight against AIDS, Peter Piot, is stepping down after 13 years, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday. Ban, in a speech before the 2008 High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS, praised Piot for being a "tireless leader who has been at the vanguard of the response to AIDS since the earliest days of the epidemic." A successor has not been named. Piot, a Belgian who codiscovered the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976, has led the UN's response to the AIDS epidemic as executive director of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS since its inception in 1995. (Reuters)