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/ 19 May 2008

China mourns earthquake victims

From tent cities in stricken Sichuan province to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, sirens wailed and millions of Chinese stood for three minutes on Monday to mourn tens of thousands who died in last week’s earthquake. The moment was observed across the vast country of 1,3-billion people at 2.28pm local time, exactly a week after the quake struck.

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/ 3 May 2008

Senegal takes back running of its airports

Senegal is to reclaim control of its airports and air traffic from a pan-African body it has threatened to quit, a Transport Ministry official said on Friday. ”As of May 10, Senegal will take back from ASECNA [Agency for the Security of Navigation in Africa and Madagascar] the running of its aeronautical activities,” said Yoro Sarr, an adviser to Air Transport Minister Farba Senghor.

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/ 28 October 2007

Bus crash kills 23 in Cameroon

A head-on crash at night between two buses killed 23 people and injured 36 others in Cameroon, state radio reported on Sunday. A third bus crushed two people on a motorcycle and plunged into a ditch after swerving to avoid the collision, which happened on Saturday evening about 70km north of the Central African country’s commercial capital, Douala.

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/ 4 October 2007

Cargo plane crashes in Kinshasa suburb

A Soviet-era Antonov 26 cargo plane crashed in Kinshasa on Thursday, smashing through a dozen houses and killing 25 people on board as well as a number of people on the ground, officials and the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo said. Witnesses said it exploded in a fireball on impact.

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/ 18 September 2007

Thai plane-crash inquiry probes wind-shear theory

Thai authorities probing a plane crash that killed 89 people in Phuket discovered on Tuesday that a system designed to check for dangerous winds was not fully working, an official said. Attention had earlier focused on the pilot, with officials saying he had been warned of a dangerous wind shear by air-traffic control but decided to land anyway.

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/ 29 August 2007

Two DRC airlines grounded after fatal crashes

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Transport Ministry has grounded two private airlines after a weekend plane crash killed 13 people in the second disaster since June, officials said on Wednesday. The licence of the Great Lakes Business Company, owner of the cargo plane that crashed on Sunday at Kongolo in Katanga Province, was suspended.