US State Department

The United States has agreed to sell its embassy building in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, to Qatari Diar, the sovereign wealth-backed developer, for an undisclosed sum.

The US State Department said that it will sell the Chancery building, home to the US Embassy in Britain for almost half a century, to the property investment company owned by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).

The building was worth an estimated £500 million at the peak of the market in July 2007 when Qatari Diar was first linked with a possible purchase. However, the building is now thought to be worth less after a 45 per cent decline in commercial property values.

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THE world became a safer place last night after the United States and Russia agreed to keep just enough nuclear weapons to kill every living thing on the face of the Earth twice.

President Obama and President Medvedev signed a historic agreement in Moscow which means there can now be only one encore to you and everything you have ever known being incinerated in a boiling cauldron of white-hot death.

A US State Department spokesman said: "At the beginning of the 1980s we had enough weapons to kill everything eight times.

"But of course back then, in the age of Spandau Ballet and The Dukes of Hazzard, it was very fashionable to be able to kill things at least six times, preferably nine.

A major UN conference on racism looks to be in disarray as more countries confirmed they will not take part.

Australia and the Netherlands joined the US, Israel and Canada in boycotting the Geneva talks. The UK is sending a delegation, but no senior official.

The move is over concerns about anti-Israel and anti-Western bias. Iran's president, who has denied the Holocaust, is to address the meeting.

The talks are meant to review progress in fighting racism since a 2001 forum.

That conference, in Durban, ended in acrimony when Arab countries tried to define Zionism as racism.

Incitement

Less than a day before it is due to get under way, the five-day Durban Review Conference is being overshadowed by political wrangling between western and Muslim nations.

A top official at the National Human Rights Committee (NHRC) has slammed a report of the US Department of State on Qatar’s record in human rights as “politicised” and “full of wrong information”.
NHRC secretary general Ali al-Marri said the report has ignored the progress made by Qatar on its human rights record.
“The US report, whether this year’s one or the previous years reports, include lots of wrong information that does not reflect the reality of human rights situation in Qatar, al-Marri said yesterday at a press meet to announce an anti-human trafficking awareness campaign.
?We are not much concerned with the American report. At the end it is issued by a single state, even if it is a super power.