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/ 25 December 2005
Shell said on Saturday it has resumed limited operations in southern Nigeria after the explosion of a pipeline but warned it is still not in a position to honour its commitments to clients. ”One of our fields has partially reopened in Kolo Creek, and there is limited loading at Bonny,” a spokesperson said.
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/ 25 December 2005
Nigerian Aids workers on Saturday welcomed a government announcement of free treatment for people suffering from the disease but questioned whether the government could fulfil its promises. The government will distribute free anti-retroviral drugs to up to 500 000 HIV/Aids patients from January next year.
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/ 22 December 2005
At least eight people were reported on Thursday to have died in an explosion that set ablaze a pipeline in the oilfields of southern Nigeria, as the Shell oil company said it is unable to make deliveries to customers. The oil giant has declared a state of force majeure, a legal term allowing a party to a contract to breach its terms legally.
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/ 21 December 2005
Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell in Nigeria was struggling on Wednesday to put out a fire that engulfed a pipeline allegedly sabotaged on Tuesday by unknown persons in the southern Niger Delta region, a company spokesperson said. The fire was apparently caused by a dynamite attack, according to an initial probe.
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/ 20 December 2005
The impeached governor of Bayelsa state in oil rich southern Nigeria was on Tuesday charged with 40 counts of corruption and money laundering in a Lagos court. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha skipped bail in London last month where he was facing money-laundering charges and ran home to escape justice.
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/ 14 December 2005
President Olusegun Obasanjo has grounded two private domestic Nigerian airlines after two deadly plane crashes killed 224 people in seven weeks. He also announced a review of all aircraft flying in Nigeria and said two experts from the International Civil Aviation Organisation will be brought in ”to ensure the integrity of the inspection”.
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/ 12 December 2005
As the last three survivors of Nigeria’s latest bloody aviation disaster struggled to cling to life on Monday, the bereaved city of Port Harcourt asked why an elderly aircraft could be allowed to spill so much young blood. A newspaper showed school pictures of members of a 71-strong party that was torn up and burnt to death on Saturday.
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/ 12 December 2005
Nigerian accident investigators have found the ”black box” flight-data recorders of a commercial airliner that crashed killing 107 people on board, a spokesperson for the country’s Civil Aviation Authority said on Sunday. An estimated 71 of those who died were schoolchildren from the Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja.
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/ 10 December 2005
A Nigerian jetliner carrying 110 passengers and crew crashed on Saturday as it approached a southern city in stormy weather, killing 103 people. Seven people survived, officials said. Reports said the plane apparently overshot the runway during a thunderstorm. An airport worker described a horrific scene: ”The place where I’m standing now is scattered with corpses.”
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/ 10 December 2005
Nigerian police on Friday arrested the governor of an oil-rich state who has been charged with money-laundering by a British court, officials said. Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha skipped bail in London last month and escaped home to Bayelsa state in southern Nigeria’s unruly Niger Delta, where his arrival triggered a political crisis.
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/ 9 December 2005
Police broke down the gate of a huge housing complex to oust thousands of civil servants and their families on Friday in the latest mass eviction by a government struggling to gain control of its chaotic and crowded cities. Amnesty International has called such evictions in Nigeria a human rights scandal.
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/ 8 December 2005
It is time to rethink the strategies used so far in the fight against HIV/Aids as they have shown their limitations, particularly in Africa, according to Michel Sidibe, the Malian who is deputy head of UNAids, the body coordinating the fight against the
pandemic.
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/ 5 December 2005
Nigeria’s state radio, television network and news agency were operating a skeleton service on Monday after thousands of journalists went on strike over unpaid allowances. ”We have decided on the strike because all government’s promises since 2003 to pay our allowances have been broken,” said a senior editor at the News Agency of Nigeria.
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/ 30 November 2005
Liberia’s new president elect, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, said on Wednesday that she hoped to find a role for her defeated rival George Weah in a broad-based government. Weah, a former football star and a hero to many of Liberia’s unemployed youth, lost to Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia’s first election since the end of its latest 14-year bout of civil war.
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/ 29 November 2005
An estimated 10Â 000 newly homeless Nigerians awoke on Tuesday in Chika, a squatter settlement in the country’s capital, Abuja, after being forced to sleep in the open following the destruction of their homes by government bulldozers. The bulldozers had on Monday pulled down more than 1Â 500 houses built illegally in the area.
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/ 28 November 2005
Hundreds of Nigerian troops descended on Monday on the capital of the country’s biggest oil-producing region after militant youths rallied around a state governor accused of embezzling millions of dollars, the military said. The deployment marks a dramatic increase in tension in the restive Niger Delta.
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/ 28 November 2005
Hundreds of Nigerian troops deployed on Monday to the capital of the country’s biggest oil producing region after militant youths rallied around a state governor accused of embezzling millions of dollars, the military said. ”We have troops deployed in Yenagoa. They went in this morning. Their numbers are in the hundreds,” said Major Said Hamed.
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/ 21 November 2005
A Nigerian state governor who had been charged in Britain with handling more than -million in stolen government funds has skipped bail and returned home, where he enjoys immunity from prosecution, officials said on Monday. The escape will prove an embarrassment both for Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo and for Britain.
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/ 18 November 2005
The release and re-arrest of members of a Yoruba organisation this week have marked the latest chapter in Nigeria’s bid to contain ethnic unrest in various parts of the country. Fredrick Fasehun and Gani Adams, leaders of the Oodua Peoples Congress, were initially jailed with four other members of the group after clashes broke out in the commercial capital of Lagos last month.
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/ 10 November 2005
Nine million young people in Nigeria are to be sent text messages on Wednesday to raise awareness about HIV/Aids.
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/ 8 November 2005
The Niger Delta’s Ogoni minority will mark the 10th anniversary of the execution of their champion Ken Saro-Wiwa on Thursday, amid anger that so little here has changed since his death shocked the world. Saro-Wiwa and eight of his comrades were hanged on November 10 1995 by Nigeria’s then military regime.
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/ 27 October 2005
Grieving relatives and solemn dignitaries gathered to mourn on Thursday at the site where a Nigerian airliner plunged to earth and killed all 177 people on board, as United States aviation experts arrived in to help investigate the crash. Nigerian agencies have yet to advance any theory as to why Bellview Airlines flight 210 lost contact with air traffic control three minutes after taking off Lagos’ Ikeja airport
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/ 25 October 2005
Nigeria is to review the safety of the ageing fleet of passenger jets operated by its small private airlines following a crash which killed 117 people, President Olusegun Obasanjo said on Tuesday. An investigation has been launched to find out why a Bellview Airlines Boeing 737 plunged to the ground and disintegrated shortly after taking off from Lagos on Saturday.
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/ 24 October 2005
Nigerian authorities have banned the private television station whose reporters were the first to find the site where an airliner crashed killing all 117 on board, the National Broadcasting Commission announced on Monday. Earlier, several Nigerian officials had incorrectly told journalists that the crash site was in Kishi, a remote rural area 400km further north.
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/ 24 October 2005
Nigeria began three days of national mourning on Monday as investigators sought to find out why a passenger airline had crashed to earth and been ripped apart, killing all the 117 passengers and crew on board. Emergency workers continued with the gruesome task of disentangling the shredded corpses of the passengers from the widely scattered wreckage of the Boeing 737 jet.
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/ 24 October 2005
Nigeria will begin three days of national mourning on Monday after an unexplained plane crash killed 117 passengers and crew flying from Lagos to the capital Abuja, the federal government announced. South African television producer Adele Lorenzo was among the dead, media reports said on Monday.
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/ 23 October 2005
A Nigerian airliner on a scheduled flight is missing and presumed crashed, officials said on Sunday, adding that helicopters have been scrambled to find any survivors. Once the plane had been missing for more than eight hours, officials from the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (Faan) confirmed that it may have plunged into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff.
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/ 21 October 2005
Avenging lynch mobs have seized and burnt alive more than 20 suspected kidnappers over the past month in and around the Nigerian city of Lagos where terrified residents have taken extreme measures to stamp out ritual child sacrifices, police and witnesses said.
Nigeria’s anti-graft agency said on Friday it has returned ,5-million to a Chinese old woman who was victim of an advance fee fraud perpetrated over a five-year period. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said in a statement the money was handed back to 86-year-old Juliana Ching in Hong Kong on September 26, 2005 after it was recovered from a criminal gang.
A government programme to provide primary-school children with free lunches has been launched in Nigeria, to encourage parents to educate their children — and to ensure that pupils learn effectively. It has become clear that poverty is still resulting in the exclusion of millions of children from the West African country’s education system.
Nigerian police and army officers blamed each other on Wednesday after a clash between their forces left three civilians dead and triggered an orgy of arson and looting. At least three civilians were killed in crossfire and a police headquarters was burned down on Tuesday after a dispute between police and soldiers erupted in street fighting.
Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, a strong opponent of the acceptance of homosexuality within the worldwide Anglican Church, has chosen a different battle at home — the fight against corruption and what he calls the ”dirty game” of politics. Akinola said the government’s fight against ”the evil of corruption” is not going nearly far enough.