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/ 30 November 2004
Grieving relatives in the Niger Delta jungle river port of Ojobo have accused Nigerian soldiers of shooting dead seven unarmed demonstrators during a community protest on an oil rig operated for the Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell.
But army spokesman Colonel Yusuf Mohammed said: ”They are all telling lies. The elders were having a meeting with the oil company when the youths disrupted them. The soldiers came to disperse them and only some few of them were injured.”
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/ 30 November 2004
If Texas executes Frances Newton as scheduled on Tuesday, she would become the first woman put to death in two years, despite serious doubts about a botched defense and a poor investigation. Only 10 women have been suffered the death penalty since it was reinstated in the United States in 1976, out of a total of 944 executions. Newton, 39, was charged in April 1987 with the murder of her husband and her two children. Her husband was found on the living room sofa with a bullet in the head, while her son and daughter were found in their beds, each with a bullet to the chest.
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/ 30 November 2004
Hundreds of delegates started arriving on Tuesday in Harare ahead of this week’s ruling party congress which is likely to see the election of Zimbabwe’s first woman vice-president. Around 9 000 delegates of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) are due to attend the five-day conference, which begins on Wednesday.
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/ 30 November 2004
Iran boasted on Tuesday that it had humiliated the United States at a board meeting of the UN atomic watchdog by agreeing to what it reiterated was only a temporary freeze of its suspect nuclear programme. ”The Islamic republic has not renounced the nuclear fuel cycle, will never renounce it and will use it,” top national security official and nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani told a news conference.
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/ 30 November 2004
The attitude of the Bush administration to the rest of the world encourages a new standard for international relations: blatant, flagrant unilateralism. It is Ali Mufuruki’s chilling phrase — the legality of the means we use to achieve this should be defined by us and nobody else — that captures the essence of this dangerous trend.
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/ 30 November 2004
The London High Court has frozen 13-million pounds (-million) worth of assets held in Britain by former Zambian President Frederick Chiluba and four other government officials on trial in Lusaka for theft and corruption, the government said on Tuesday. The freeze remains in effect until January 12, when the court will hear arguments from representatives of the Zambian government and Chiluba.
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/ 30 November 2004
Daniel Barenboim, the acclaimed Israeli conductor, on Monday unveiled his latest initiative to help the Middle East peace process — a music kindergarten for Palestinian refugee children. The kindergarten in the Palestinian town of Ramallah opened three weeks ago and is working extremely well, Barenboim said.
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/ 30 November 2004
A lesbian couple’s appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal to have their marriage legally recognised and registered succeeded on Tuesday. The court, in a majority decision, declared that under the Constitution the common law concept of marriage was to be developed to embrace same-sex partners.
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/ 30 November 2004
The price of petrol will drop by 19c a litre from midnight, the Department of Minerals and Energy said on Tuesday. Diesel with 0.3% sulphur content will drop by 20.7c per litre, wholesale, and diesel with a 0.05% sulphur content will drop by 22.7c per litre, wholesale.
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/ 30 November 2004
South Africa’s third-quarter 2004 gross domestic product growth increased by 5,6% on a quarter-on- quarter seasonally adjusted annualised basis from a revised 4.5% (initial estimate 3.9%) in the second quarter, Statistics South Africa said on Tuesday.