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/ 20 January 2008
Kenya’s opposition party, determined to bring down the government of President Mwai Kibaki, has called for another day of ”peaceful rallies” across Kenya in defiance of a ban and despite the deaths of more than 20 people in this week’s demonstrations.
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/ 23 December 2007
The handful of grain Abiye Omar clutches in her skinny hand has travelled a long way from the fertile fields of America’s Midwest to the desolate Somali seaside town of Merka. It has sailed on a relief ship through seas plagued by pirates and sharks, then been carried ashore by porters into the hands of aid workers who have to contend with bandits, arsonists and insurgents.
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/ 20 November 2007
Aid workers are calling it Africa’s biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia. The slender 23-year-old’s son Mohamed died of hunger. So did her daughter Isha. ”I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet,” she says, gently cradling the wizened face of Muhiadeen, her four-month-old son.
Gunmen seized four more foreign workers amid a dramatic rise in violence that has roiled Nigeria’s southern petroleum-producing region, oil industry officials said on Wednesday. The attackers carrying assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed a transport vessel carrying the workers in the southern Niger Delta minutes before midnight on Tuesday.
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/ 1 February 2007
Bird flu has claimed its first human victim in Africa’s most-populous nation, killing a young Nigerian woman due to graduate from university and be married this year, officials and the victim’s fiancé said. An outbreak of H5N1 bird flu hit Nigeria last year, but no human infections had been reported until Wednesday.
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/ 10 November 2006
Eight Nigerian hostages escaped and five others were released from an oil facility where they had been held since armed men raided the Italian-run pumping station earlier this week. Forty-eight Nigerian employees of Agip had been held in the south of the country since armed protesters overran and shut down Agip’s Tebidaba oil pumping station on Monday.
Militants who led a deadly attack on a military convoy escorting oil workers in the restive south also abducted 25 Nigerian petroleum-industry employees, the leading oil firm in Africa’s biggest producer said on Tuesday. The hostage takers hadn’t made any ransom demands earlyon Tuesday after the attack and seizure a day earlier.
Gun battles erupted in multiple locations in southern Nigeria’s oil hub of Port Harcourt on Sunday night, and witnesses said a group of foreigners was taken hostage from a nightclub amid the shooting. A witness said he saw more than 10 people go into the nightclub and drag a group of foreigners away while shooting into the air.
Sweat is running down Patricia Clark’s face as she shouts at a crowd of hundreds of Liberians through a megaphone. ”The law says, if you jump on a woman without her consent, that is rape. You will go to prison for 10 years. If you rape a child, you will get life. You die in prison; they bury you; they will chain you in your grave.”
Spillover from the Darfur conflict is in danger of destabilising the entire Central African region, say observers. Since the war in Sudan erupted, rebel groups have formed in neighbouring Chad and are beginning to emerge in the Central African Republic, which shares a border with both states.