The Nigerian government is suing the world’s largest drug manufacturer, Pfizer, for £3,5-billion in damages for allegedly carrying out illegal trials of an anti-meningitis drug that killed and disabled children. The children died or suffered serious side effects when the antibiotic, Trovan, was administered in Kano during a meningitis outbreak in 1996.
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/ 23 November 2006
President Robert Mugabe’s fight against corruption is closing in on his closest confidants. The 82-year-old leader is in a quandary and is unwilling to pass a routine political directive for the arrest and prosecution of Zanu-PF officials allegedly involved in illegal foreign currency dealings.
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/ 30 October 2006
After the first killing, there was a great deal of sympathy for the Honourable Tom Cholmondeley among Kenya’s disparate white population. The aristocrats who own vast tracts of land, the alcohol and drug-fuelled ”Kenya cowboys” living the fast life in tourism and conservation, and the middle-class suburbanites who ”love Africa” but despatch their children to school in England could all understand how the 38-year-old scion of the country’s most prominent white settler family.
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/ 30 October 2006
Moves to expel 150 000 Arabs who have settled in Niger over the past three decades are already underway, one day after the government made the surprise announcement that the Arabs, known as Mahamid, would have five days to leave the country. Many of the Arabs settled in Niger after leaving neighbouring Chad following the 1974 drought and again during the Chadian civil war of the 1980s.
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/ 15 September 2006
”We were very excited when the antiretroviral [ARV] drugs came at last,”’ said Tony Moll, chief medical officer at the Church of Scotland hospital near Tugela Ferry, KwaZulu-Natal. ”We witnessed dramatic turnarounds in the health of patients with HIV. Then we had a small group who responded magnificently to the ARVs — their immune systems were bouncing back — while they kept on getting sicker.”
Israel was fighting on two fronts this week as one military disaster piled on another. Lebanese militia killed and captured troops on Israel’s northern border while the army launched a fresh ground assault into the Gaza Strip in pursuit of a third abducted soldier.
Hamas has made a major political climbdown by agreeing to sections of a document that recognises Israel’s right to exist and a negotiated two-state solution, according to Palestinian leaders. In a bitter struggle for power, Hamas is bowing to an ultimatum from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to endorse the document drawn up by Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails.
Ahmed Ayad was unfortunate to fall sick under what Israel and its allies in the West are defining as the ”ministries of terror”. The 42-year-old Palestinian father of five began kidney dialysis at a hospital in Gaza City six weeks ago at just about the time Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and international sanctions against the Hamas government began to bite in the Health Ministry.
The George W Bush administration has yet to decide on a clear plan B for Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But military planning is progressing to fill that policy vacuum and may create a momentum of its own, say former administration officials and political observers.
The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, says Israel’s plan to impose its final borders deep inside the occupied territories while expropriating large areas of Palestinian land for Jewish settlers will lead to another war in a decade. Speaking in Gaza City, Abbas said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would jeopardise the possibility of long-term peace if he refused to negotiate an agreement that ordinary Palestinians considered just.