Unidentified gunmen attacked the two main military barracks in Côte d’Ivoire’s largest city, Abidjan, on Monday, setting off a battle with security forces that officials said killed 10 people and heightened tensions in the war-divided nation. Gunfire and heavy explosions shook the barracks at Akuedo for about an hour.
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/ 10 December 2005
A Nigerian jetliner carrying 110 passengers and crew crashed on Saturday as it approached a southern city in stormy weather, killing 103 people. Seven people survived, officials said. Reports said the plane apparently overshot the runway during a thunderstorm. An airport worker described a horrific scene: ”The place where I’m standing now is scattered with corpses.”
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/ 9 December 2005
Police broke down the gate of a huge housing complex to oust thousands of civil servants and their families on Friday in the latest mass eviction by a government struggling to gain control of its chaotic and crowded cities. Amnesty International has called such evictions in Nigeria a human rights scandal.
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/ 14 November 2005
Côte d’Ivoire’s government has begun rebuilding its air force, one year after it was mostly destroyed by French forces in retaliation for an air raid that killed nine French soldiers, a United Nations report says. The report says it is unclear whether the attempt to rebuild the air force is in violation of an arms embargo.
Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, a strong opponent of the acceptance of homosexuality within the worldwide Anglican Church, has chosen a different battle at home — the fight against corruption and what he calls the ”dirty game” of politics. Akinola said the government’s fight against ”the evil of corruption” is not going nearly far enough.
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/ 29 September 2005
Nigeria’s Anglican archbishop said on Thursday that Nigerian churches might cut ties with the Church of England if it did not revise its stance on homosexuality, which accepts gay priests in same-sex partnerships. ”As of now, we have not yet reached the point of schism, but there’s a broken relationship,” Archbishop Peter Akinola told reporters in the capital, Abuja.
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/ 20 September 2005
Nigeria’s Anglican church has deleted all references to its mother church from its constitution, deepening a rift over homosexuality but stopping short of a feared schism. A statement on the church’s website on Tuesday said ”all former references to ‘communion with the see of Canterbury’ were deleted” at a meeting last week.
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/ 6 September 2005
Nigerian trade unions and activists said on Monday they will hold a series of rallies to protest against a steep rise in fuel prices, but will not call a nationwide strike as they had earlier threatened. Nigeria has ordered price hikes of up to 40% on fuels such as gas and diesel.
Rescue workers have pulled more bodies from the wreckage of a five-storey building that collapsed on Monday as a construction team was sleeping inside, and the death toll is now at eight, a Red Cross official said on Wednesday. More corpses may still be lying in the debris, said Chika Onah.
Hundreds of youths, many with faces daubed in war paint, run through the Kaiama village in Nigeria’s oil-rich delta, rallying to commemorate the death of a secessionist leader killed in the 1960s whom they see as a hero for today. Few had dared advocate the breakup of Nigeria since 1970, when the three-year Biafran civil war ended after causing over one million deaths.