Dozens of ex-combatants from Sierra Leone’s 10-year civil war gathered on Saturday for ”healing ceremonies” to make peace with victims of the brutal conflict that left thousands dead. ”Small-scale ceremonies have already been held in other parts in the district,” said Beatrice Allie, one of the coordinators of the project.
Chad and the United Nations Children’s Fund began on Friday to send home 103 African children that a French charity had sought to fly to France in October for adoption, authorities said. Eighty-three children were the first to leave an orphanage in Abeche, eastern Chad, on Friday in two buses.
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/ 28 February 2008
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, scientists in Spain are warning that the plagues of jellyfish that have been the scourge of Mediterranean swimmers in recent years will return this summer. Global warming has also brought about the ideal conditions for jellyfish to breed: mild temperatures, little rain and a lack of the usual winter rainstorms.
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/ 27 February 2008
Two Venezuelan helicopters flew into Colombia on Wednesday to pick up four lawmakers held hostage for years in jungle camps by Marxist rebels, in a diplomatic victory for Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia last month released two politicians in a deal brokered by Chávez.
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/ 20 February 2008
A rebel group from Nigeria’s oil producing Niger Delta demanded on Wednesday that lawyers, relatives and the Red Cross be allowed to see their detained leader, Henry Okah, to confirm he is alive. The government denied a report by the rebel Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta that Okah had been shot dead.
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/ 12 February 2008
A major assault by the Sudanese army and allied militia has left two Darfur towns badly damaged by fire, sources close to a United Nations reconnaissance mission to the region said on Tuesday. The news came as the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed one of its staff members had been killed in the offensive.
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/ 4 February 2008
Resolutions at the United Nations or African Union could alter the mission of French troops in Chad, France’s Foreign Minister said on Monday as a first planeload of evacuees landed at a Paris airport. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Defence Minister Herve Morin said French forces secured Chad’s airbases and were protecting French and foreign civilians.
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/ 29 January 2008
Former United Nations chief Kofi Annan brought together Kenya’s political rivals on Tuesday in a push to mediate an end to the post-election crisis and stop spreading tribal bloodshed. About a dozen people were killed in the country on Tuesday, bringing the toll to more than 850.
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/ 25 January 2008
A new flare-up of violence shook Kenya on Friday and fresh political recriminations dulled hopes a meeting between the president and opposition leader could resolve a month-long crisis. The local Red Cross said clashes related to a disputed December 27 poll had engulfed areas around the town of Nakuru.
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/ 24 January 2008
With a tracing programme managed by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Kenya Red Cross Society, the hopes of Kenya’s displaced who are missing a relative are not lost. The system is often as simple as lending lost relatives a cellphone to call family.
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/ 14 January 2008
Several people have died while 70Â 000 others were displaced by floods in central Mozambique and the situation is expected to worsen till mid-February, the National Institute of Natural Disaster Management said on Monday.
Kenyans across the political divide prayed for peace on Sunday while aid workers sought to bring relief to nearly 200 000 refugees from post-election violence. ”Our leaders have failed us. They have brought this catastrophe upon us. So now we are turning to the Almighty to save Kenya,” said Jane Riungu, leading her five children to a hilltop church.
Cambodia suffered its worst-ever outbreak of dengue fever last year and it killed 407 people, most of them children, the highest toll in nearly a decade. Dengue, which causes fever had infected nearly 40 000 people since the first outbreaks last May, Ngan Chantha, director of the Health Ministry’s anti-dengue programme, said on Friday.
Supporters of Kenyan opposition chief Raila Odinga were on Friday set to defy a ban on a rally in the capital, Nairobi, as international pressure for an end to the political crisis mounted. The death toll from in post-election violence has already climbed past 350.
Police raids, arson and tribal attacks over the last 24 hours have claimed more than 100 lives in Kenya, police and officials said on Tuesday, bringing the toll for five days of post-election bloodshed to 299. ”At least 30 have burned to death inside a church in the Kiamba area,” a police commander said.
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/ 28 December 2007
Rescue workers stepped up a hunt on Friday for victims of landslides and floods that claimed scores of lives on Indonesia’s Java Island and left thousands homeless, an official said. The landslides smashed through homes, burying families alive, in the early hours of Wednesday.
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/ 27 December 2007
Indonesian rescuers on Thursday hunted for victims of landslides and floods on Java Island that have left more than 130 people feared dead and tens of thousands displaced, officials said. Landslides hit two districts in Central Java in the early hours of Wednesday morning, engulfing entire homes and blocking roads.
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/ 26 December 2007
Landslides triggered by heavy downpours killed at least 77 people on Wednesday in Indonesia’s densely populated Central Java province, officials and local media reports said. More than 12 hours of incessant rains triggered landslide in two districts of Central Java province, officials said.
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/ 28 November 2007
A vast archive of German war records opened its doors to the public on Wednesday, giving historians and Holocaust survivors, who have waited more than 60 years, access to concentration-camp records detailing Nazi horrors. The 11 countries that oversee the archive have finished ratifying an accord unsealing about 50-million pages.
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/ 23 November 2007
Tsitsikamma district residents in the Eastern Cape are being evacuated by Cacadu’s disaster management due to heavy rains, the South African Weather Service said on Friday. ”The R61 and R62 are still closed. One lane is open on the N2 between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town,” spokesperson Garth Sampson said.
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/ 23 November 2007
About 1 000 people have been evacuated from their homes and sections of the N2 near George has been closed, as heavy rains continued to pelt the southern Cape on Friday. Disaster official Gerhard Otto said the Red Cross was assisting with blankets and mattresses for those affected, mainly from low-income areas in Knynsa, Sedgfield and Plettenberg Bay.
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/ 5 November 2007
The French opposition on Monday dismissed President Nicolas Sarkozy’s trip to Chad to bring seven Europeans home as a ”Zorro act” as questions mounted over a charity accused of trying to abduct 103 children. Three French journalists and four Spanish air hostesses came back on Sarkozy’s presidential jet.
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/ 1 November 2007
Most of the 103 African children who a French group had planned to fly out of Chad as orphans said they had families, which included at least one close relative, United Nations agencies said on Thursday. A joint report also said most of the 21 girls and 82 boys aged one to 10 years came from villages on the Chad-Sudan border.
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/ 31 October 2007
Chadians chanting ”No to the slave trade, no to child-trafficking” protested on Wednesday against a French group accused of trying to illegally fly children from the the country to Europe. Several hundred angry locals gathered outside the governor’s office in the town of Abeche, where nine French nationals and seven Spaniards were arrested last week.
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/ 28 October 2007
Firefighters tightened their grip on California’s wildfires with the help of cooler weather, but a threat remained on Sunday of health hazards from choking plumes of smoke over the region. Cooler temperatures, calmer winds and spots of drizzle allowed firefighters to staunch or contain most of the 23 fires that have erupted since last Sunday.
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/ 19 October 2007
A bomb explosion in an upscale shopping mall in the Philippine capital, Manila, on Friday killed eight people and wounded more than 100, police and local officials said. Police initially suspected the blast was caused by an exploding gas cylinder in a restaurant, but police sources later said they found traces of plastic explosives at the site.
At least 58 people have died in Vietnam since a typhoon slammed into the country, bringing the worst floods in decades to northern and central areas, rescue officials said on Monday. Emergency workers were taking water, food and medical supplies by boat and helicopter to stranded villagers cut off after rivers burst through dykes.
At least 30 people drowned in a river in the remote north-western Nigerian state of Kebbi after two dug-out boats they were travelling in collided head-on, the Red Cross said on Friday. One of the boats was laden with petroleum products when it collided with the other boat, which was carrying traders.
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/ 28 September 2007
Hundreds of thousands of people awaited desperately needed relief supplies and faced the threat of epidemics on Friday as the death toll climbed in Africa’s worst floods in three decades. At least 300 have died in the flooding since heavy rains began sweeping across the continent two months ago.
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/ 27 September 2007
Floods that have left hundreds of thousands of Africans homeless across vast swathes of the continent have claimed 64 lives in Nigeria and 33 in Burkina Faso, government and aid officials said on Thursday. Nigeria’s Red Cross said the death toll covered a period since mid-July, while 22 000 people have been displaced in 10 sometimes arid northern states.
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/ 26 September 2007
The Red Cross warned on Wednesday that a food crisis could be looming across East and West Africa due to the massive damage wrought on crops by ongoing flooding. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies highlighted the situation in Ghana, Sudan and Uganda.
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/ 21 September 2007
Floods are continuing to ravage an arc of African countries from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, washing away homes and ruining crops, and have been reported as the worst in years in many states. Uganda is experiencing its worst floods in memory, with about 89 000 households ”severely affected”.