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/ 29 December 2007
Kenya’s opposition challenger, Raila Odinga, led on Saturday in the race to govern East Africa’s largest economy but tempers flared over the slow pace of vote tallying in the incumbent’s strongholds. In a third day of ballot counting, Odinga, heir of a wealthy nationalist hero, led President Mwai Kibaki.
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/ 28 December 2007
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki trailed his main rival on Friday in the race to lead East Africa’s biggest economy for the next five years, according to early tallies by local media. Partial results from three main television stations all gave opposition challenger Raila Odinga a strong lead over his former ally.
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/ 28 December 2007
Early forecasts showed Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki in a close fight on Friday with his main challenger after an election diplomats praised as smooth, despite sporadic violence and rigging claims by both sides. An exit poll gave Kibaki the lead, but partial tallies compiled by three local broadcasters put his rival, Raila Odinga, ahead in the race.
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/ 27 December 2007
Queues several kilometres long snaked around Africa’s largest slum on Thursday as Kenyans across the country and the class divide turned out en masse to vote in a close presidential election. In all of the East African nation’s previous polls, there was either only one candidate to vote for or only one with a realistic chance of winning.
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/ 27 December 2007
Guarded by police, Kenyans voted on Thursday in a presidential election preceded by violence, tainted by allegations of rigging and likely to be the closest in more than four decades since independence from Britain. President Mwai Kibaki (76) having unseated the country’s 24-year ruling party in 2002, himself faces the possibility of losing power.
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/ 26 December 2007
Two heavyweights of Kenya’s post-independence politics square off in a presidential vote on Thursday after a campaign that has overshadowed Christmas and seen the opposition holding a small lead in opinion polls. The closeness of the vote has raised fears that fraud and intimidation may be used to try to swing results.
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/ 25 December 2007
Kenyan police fired teargas to disperse stone-throwing supporters of the country’s main presidential contenders on Monday after the candidates made a final push to win votes in a race deemed too close to call. Scuffles briefly flared shortly after President Mwai Kibaki and his opposition challenger, Raila Odinga, addressed huge rallies in the capital.
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/ 24 December 2007
Two heavyweights of Kenya’s post-independence politics square off in a presidential vote on Thursday whose run-up has seen the opposition hold a small lead in opinion polls over President Mwai Kibaki. But the closeness of the vote has raised fears fraud and intimidation may be used to try to swing the result.
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/ 21 December 2007
The European Union’s chief election observer on Friday condemned violence that has marred the lead-up to Kenya’s elections, left at least 70 people dead since July and risks disenfranchising 20 000 people. Alexander Graf Lambsdorff was visiting the epicentre of tribal clashes that have been ongoing for months.
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/ 20 December 2007
A Kenyan Court of Appeal dismissed a suit seeking to stop the flotation of the country’s leading mobile operator Safaricom on Thursday, clearing the way for the government to go ahead with the offer. Three opposition legislators had sought to block the country’s biggest initial public offering, saying it had not been done transparently.
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/ 19 December 2007
Civilians fleeing violence in east Democratic Republic of Congo are facing a shortage of medical care as disease outbreaks begin to plague the troubled region, the charity Médecins sans Frontières said on Wednesday. Fighting between government troops and forces loyal to renegade general Laurent Nkunda have pushed civilians from their homes several times in ongoing flare-ups.
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/ 17 December 2007
Suspected Somali pirates attacked an Italian-owned cargo ship on Monday as it headed for Kenya’s Mombasa port through one of the world’s most dangerous waterways. The MV Jolly T was attacked by gunmen believed to be pirates off the shore of Somalia after bringing general cargo through the Suez canal.
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/ 17 December 2007
Kenya’s presidential race entered its final stretch on Monday, with the economy, corruption and tribalism looming large in ageing incumbent Mwai Kibaki’s bid to secure a second term. The last batch of opinion polls before the December 27 vote gave flamboyant opposition candidate Raila Odinga a slight edge on Kibaki.
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/ 17 December 2007
The International Organisation for Migration has launched a campaign to raise awareness of human trafficking in Tanzania, a country increasingly becoming a transit point. The three-month campaign dubbed ”Uwe sauti Yao” (Be their voice) was launched on Sunday at a hip-hop rally in the capital Dar es Salaam.
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/ 16 December 2007
The military wing of Somalia’s Islamist movement plans to intensify its offensive against government troops and their Ethiopian allies, a senior commander said on Sunday. Muktar Ali Robow said al-Shabab had killed nearly 500 Ethiopian soldiers and would fight until foreign troops left the Horn of Africa country.
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/ 15 December 2007
Crops rot in the fields, farms and schools are abandoned, the black hulks of burned houses dot the landscape. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and many women raped. On a dirt road climbing up through green countryside, a heavily armed patrol of police troops stares nervously into the thick bush, wary of a militia ambush.
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/ 14 December 2007
During a work break, Dennis Ouma Ochieng sips his soda and declares the one thing that will decide his choice in Kenya’s upcoming presidential election: tribe. Ochieng, a Luo, will vote later this month for another Luo, Raila Odinga. And not because he thinks Odinga will do a better job than incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu.
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/ 13 December 2007
Kenya’s First Lady, Lucy Kibaki, on Wednesday slapped an official who confused her name with that of a woman who has been reported as being the president’s second wife, a report said. Lucy Muthoni Kibaki slapped an undersecretary in the Office of the President during a presidential awards ceremony, independent NTV reported.
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/ 12 December 2007
Somali pirates who seized a Japanese chemical tanker in October and were demanding a -million ransom have left the vessel without hurting any of its crew, a United States military spokesperson said on Wednesday. The Panama-registered Golden Nori was carrying benzene from Singapore to Israel when it was hijacked on October 28.
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/ 11 December 2007
A Kenyan pilot who survived more than a week eating leaves and drinking his urine after crashing in dense forest says he will continue flying, despite cheating death in his second accident in two years. Captain Solomon Nyanjui was feared dead after his helicopter went missing during a November 15 flight from Isiolo to Nairobi.
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/ 10 December 2007
Kenya’s main opposition party accused the government on Monday of bribing voters and risking regional insecurity by trying to rig polls due on December 27. ”A rigged electoral process will cause such chaos and political instability in Kenya, not only here but in the entire East Africa region,” presidential challenger Raila Odinga said.
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/ 10 December 2007
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Sunday appealed for calm as pre-election mayhem that has killed dozens gripped the country ahead of elections later this month. At least 16 people were killed, dozens of huts razed and 16 000 people displaced in the Molo district, about 170km north-west of Nairobi, police said.
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/ 7 December 2007
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki fell further behind his main challenger, Raila Odinga, in opinion polls on Friday, just three weeks before elections that are expected to be the East African country’s closest. The latest Steadman poll gave opposition leader Odinga 46% to Kibaki’s 42%. Its last poll two weeks ago had the 76-year-old incumbent running neck-and-neck with Odinga.
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/ 7 December 2007
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) representative for Somalia on Friday voiced his concern at the increasing number of rape cases in the country’s war-torn capital, Mogadishu. "Sexual violence and rape are part of the game now," Christian Balslev-Olesen said at a press briefing on the deteriorating access to health in Mogadishu.
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/ 7 December 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf said on Friday he was in good health after recovering from a bout of pneumonia, and laughed off a flurry of reports he was near death. ”I’m fine, I am OK,” Yusuf said in an exclusive interview from his hospital bed in Nairobi. ”I had pneumonia, but the doctors have taken it out [treated it] and I am well now,” he said.
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/ 6 December 2007
The cost of adopting responsible policies on climate change for global economies could be balanced by the creation of millions of "green jobs," the United Nations said on Thursday. In a statement, UN Environment Programme chief Achim Steiner called for a major boost to so-called clean industries.
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/ 6 December 2007
Somalia’s President Abdullahi Yusuf is recovering from bronchitis in a Nairobi hospital and will fly to Britain for a check-up on his liver transplant, the Somali ambassador to Kenya said on Thursday. Suggestions by some diplomatic sources that Yusuf was in a very serious condition were ”lies”, said envoy Mohamed Ali Nur.
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/ 5 December 2007
Land clashes in Kenya’s fertile Rift Valley highlands have killed 16 people, uprooted hundreds and fuelled fears of a bloody campaign ahead of a December 27 election, police said on Wednesday. About 14-million Kenyans are eligible to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections in East Africa’s biggest economy but many are braced for violent skirmishes.
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/ 5 December 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf spent a second day in hospital on Wednesday with a condition some sources called very serious but an envoy said was a routine check-up for an old liver transplant. In a tumultuous week for Somali politics, an exiled Islamist leader rejected a call by Somalia’s new prime minister for talks to try to end 16 years of conflict.
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/ 1 December 2007
A deadline for Ethiopia and Eritrea to agree on the physical demarcation of their border expired on Saturday amid escalating tension between the two nations, leaving the frontier only delineated on maps. For now, analysts expect no military movement in the ground, although rival troops are eyeballing each other near their 1 000kmf border.
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/ 28 November 2007
An international media watchdog condemned as ”ridiculous” and illegal on Wednesday the Mogadishu mayor’s banning of media interviews with Somali insurgents and other tough restrictions on local journalists. Mayor and former warlord Mohamed Dheere called media heads in this week to impose the restrictions.
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/ 28 November 2007
More than one billion trees have been planted around the world in 2007, with Ethiopia and Mexico leading in the drive to combat climate change, a United Nations report said Wednesday. The Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme said the mass tree planting will help mitigate effects of pollution and environmental deterioration.