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/ 4 February 2001

SHELL DENIES ABUSES IN NIGERIA

ANGLO-Dutch oil group Shell has denied all charges of human rights violations in Nigeria’s oil rich Niger-Delta region at a human rights panel hearing. Replying to allegations of human rights abuse and environmental degradation of the southern oil communities, the company said the allegation of environmental devastation seems to be exaggerated to attract attention to […]

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/ 4 February 2001

TOURISTS ATTACKED BY BANDITS IN NIGER

ARMED bandits in the popular Air mountains region of northern Niger have attacked a group of tourists, most of them Americans and Austrians. No one was injured in the attack, but the group of about 20 bandits made off with three all-terrain vehicles the tourists had hired, and about 45 million CFA francs (68_000 euros) […]

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/ 4 February 2001

ANGOLAN REBELS ?DOWN MILITARY PLANE?

UNITA rebels in Angola claim they brought down an Antonov-26 military aircraft in the east of the African country on Thursday, killing all 22 people on board, according to a report by the Portuguese news agency LUSA. Citing a UNITA statement, the agency said the rebels hit the plane with anti-aircraft fire and that it […]

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/ 4 February 2001

CONGO, RWANDA OPEN DOOR TO PEACE

NEW Congolese President Joseph Kabila has met President Paul Kagame of Rwanda for talks in the United States, raising hopes of a revival of a 1999 deal to end the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 30-month war. The two men, whose countries are the key adversaries in fighting which has raged on despite the July 1999 […]

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/ 3 February 2001

NIGERIAN ROADS TAKE HIGH TOLL

NEARLY 7_000 people died and more than 20_000 were injured in a total of 12_000 road accidents recorded in Nigeria last year. The number of deaths recorded was up almost 15% from the 1999 figure, to 6_797 from 5_921. The number of people injured in accidents rose to 20_555 from 18_001 a year earlier, a […]

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/ 3 February 2001

All aboard the Unisa gravy train

DAVID MACFARLANE and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday CHAIR a meeting a month and rake in R240_000 to R360_000 a year. That’s the jaw-dropping deal for some council members at Unisa, a university plagued by low staff morale and under severe financial stress from declining student intakes. Occupying the plushest seat on the Unisa gravy […]

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/ 2 February 2001

Dancer with a spark

As the polarised reactions to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark have demonstrated, one person’s tragedy is another’s melodrama; one person’s deeply moving is another’s irksomely sentimental. If melodrama is tragedy that fails to move one, then sentimentality is emotion to which you do not respond.

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/ 2 February 2001

Unbeatable Shyamalan

M Night Shyamalan, the 30-year-old writer-director of the commercially (10th-highest grossing film of all time) and artistically successful <i>The Sixth Sense</i>, has a knack of drawing us into a world that is so unique and mysterious, yet grounded, that we can only marvel as we are swept along a road with very few signposts.