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/ 19 October 2006
Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday declared a state of emergency in the troubled Ekiti State in the country’s south-west. The governor of the state, Ayo Fayose, and his deputy, Biodun Olujimi, were impeached on Monday by the state’s Parliament on graft charges and the speaker of Parliament, Friday Aderemi, was sworn in by the state’s acting chief judge as acting governor.
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/ 19 October 2006
Trade ministers from four cotton-growing African nations will meet top United States officials next week for talks expected to focus on a stalled world trade round. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns and US Trade Representative Susan Schwab will meet the trade ministers from Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali on Wednesday.
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/ 19 October 2006
Visa and MasterCard have stopped accepting credit card transactions for purchases of online music made on a Russian website accused of selling music illegally, officials for both payment systems said. San Francisco-based Visa asked member banks not to process purchases from AllofMP3.com from September 1, said Simon Barker, a spokesperson for the company.
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/ 19 October 2006
The Cabinet has approved the distribution of R73,8-million from the Criminal Assets Recovery Fund (Cara) to law-enforcement agencies and government departments working with victims of crime, the Ministry for Justice and Constitutional Development said on Wednesday.
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/ 19 October 2006
United States President George Bush has staked out a bold claim to the final frontier, asserting vigorously the country’s right to deny access to space to any adversary hostile to US interests. Bush outlined the importance of space to the national interest, saying its domination is as crucial to to their defences as air or sea power.
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/ 19 October 2006
An official inquiry into the killing of 193 unarmed protesters during the Ethiopian election has found that the victims were shot, beaten and strangled to death in a ”massacre” by the security forces. But the government is trying to suppress the report on the killings, according to a senior member of the inquiry team.
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/ 19 October 2006
The Department of Minerals and Energy could implement a retail petrol-price cut of about nine cents per litre (c/l) on November 1 2006, provided the daily over-recovery remains at or above the October 18 level. This would bring the total cut to 95c/l since the retail petrol price peaked at R7,04 a litre in August in Gauteng.
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/ 19 October 2006
The blaze of publicity surrounding Madonna’s whirlwind adoption of a 13-month-old Malawian boy and her plans to create a facility to care for 4 000 orphans have raised deeper questions about how best to care for Africa’s vulnerable children. By 2010, there will be 18-million African children who will have lost at least one parent to Aids, according to estimates by the United Nations.
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/ 19 October 2006
We at the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> are developing an unhealthy relationship with Court 6 E of the Johannesburg High Court. The court orderlies know us well. Too well. Last Saturday, we were interdicted for the third time in a year and a half.It is an irony that the interdict, brought by the South African Broadcasting Corporation to make us take down a copy of the commission report into blacklisting off our website, came just four days before press freedom day.
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/ 18 October 2006
Former president FW de Klerk congratulated South Africa and the foreign ministry for being elected to the United Nations Security Council. In a statement on Wednesday, De Klerk said the overwhelming vote that South Africa received in the UN’s general assembly was an indication of the esteem in which the country was held in the international community.