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/ 29 November 2007
A British teacher accused of insulting Muslims after her class called a teddy bear Mohammad spent more than five hours behind closed doors in a Khartoum courtroom on Thursday as a judge heard the case against her. She was arrested and charged after one of the school staff reported her to the authorities.
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/ 29 November 2007
Côte d’Ivoire government troops and rebels controlling the country’s north will start to disarm by December 22 before forming a new national army, a foreign peace mediator said on Thursday. The announcement was made by an aide to Djibril Bassole, Foreign Affairs Minister of neighbouring Burkina Faso.
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/ 29 November 2007
Overtaken as the largest funder of global HIV/Aids programmes, the World Bank is now focusing on easing the economic damage inflicted by the syndrome in Africa and finding ways of controlling its spread through better prevention, care and treatment. Global funding for HIV/Aids reached -billion in 2007 compared to ,6-billion available in 2001.
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/ 28 November 2007
Chadian rebels warned a European Union peacekeeping force bound for eastern Chad on Wednesday not to side with President Idriss Déby Itno, saying they would fight it as a foreign occupation army if it did so. The warning from the rebel Assembly of Forces for Change followed the biggest battle in months in eastern Chad.
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/ 28 November 2007
It’s hard to see the looming threat of war with Ethiopia as you walk Eritrea’s tree-lined boulevards or enter its Italian-style cafes. But beneath the Eritrean capital’s tranquil surface, many Eritreans say they are worried about a repeat of the 1998 to 2000 border war that killed about 70 000 people.
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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.
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/ 28 November 2007
The Sudanese government is putting up obstacles to the deployment of a 26 000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur that could destroy the effectiveness of the joint United Nations-African Union mission, the United Nations peacekeeping chief warned on Tuesday.
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/ 28 November 2007
Australia’s Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd arrived in the nation’s capital on Wednesday to choose his new Cabinet, aides said, as outgoing John Howard and his vanquished team cleared out their desks. Rudd (50) stormed to power in a landslide election victory on Saturday that wiped out Howard’s conservative government after almost 12 years in office.
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/ 27 November 2007
Internationally sponsored talks over the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo were deadlocked on Tuesday, after Kosovo Albanian leaders rejected Serbia’s proposal for self-governance. Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population wants to break all ties with Serbia.
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/ 27 November 2007
The mayor of war-wracked Mogadishu has banned Somali media from publishing interviews with government opponents, or reporting on military operations and the city’s refugee exodus, journalists and watchdogs said on Tuesday. The measures announced by mayor and former warlord Mohamed Dheere put further pressure on journalists.
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/ 27 November 2007
Ethiopia has boosted its defence budget by more than -million to gird for a possible resumption of hostilities with Eritrea over their disputed border, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told Parliament on Tuesday. ”Our military budget has been raised proportionally from three billion to 3,5-billion birr [a rise of 16,7%, equivalent to ,3-million],” Meles said.
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/ 27 November 2007
China on Tuesday voiced deep concern about the safety of its peacekeepers in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region after rebel groups boycotting the peace process declared they were not immune from attack. ”Up to now there has been no incident, but we are deeply concerned about the matter,” the Chinese ambassador to Khartoum, Li Cheng Wen, said.
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/ 27 November 2007
Leaders of Côte d’Ivoire were to meet on Tuesday with President Blaise Compaore of neighbouring Burkina Faso to fine-tune details of a peace deal brokered by him. Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and his Prime Minister Guillaume Soro will travel to Burkina Faso to discuss and sign supplemetary sections to the peace accords.
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/ 27 November 2007
Soldiers and rebels have both claimed to have killed several hundred of their opponents in combat on Monday in eastern Chad. The battles at Abougouleigne left ”several hundred [rebels] dead, several injured and several prisoners of war”, according to the statement from the army’s general staff.
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/ 27 November 2007
People around the world are preparing for floods, droughts and other natural disasters in ways largely dictated by wealth and poverty as evidence of climate change mounts, a United Nations report said on Tuesday. Even if countries took steps to cut greenhouse gases, temperatures would continue to rise until 2050 due to accumulated carbon emissions.
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/ 26 November 2007
In 2005 I spoke to a traumatised filmmaker who had returned from the Democratic Republic of Congo where he interviewed a 19-year-old woman who 18 months before had been raped by 49 soldiers, one after the other. The pregnant teenager was then shot in the belly by the soldiers, killing her baby and rendering her sterile, writes journalist Charlene Smith.
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/ 26 November 2007
Serbia will not give up ”an inch” of Kosovo, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Monday as talks on the breakaway province’s future entered a critical phase before a United Nations deadline next month. ”Serbia will not let an inch of its territory be taken away,” a defiant Kostunica told reporters.
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/ 26 November 2007
A senior United Nations official has called on armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) troubled Nord Kivu region to lay down their arms and reintegrate into the regular army, a statement said on Monday. Intense fighting has been shaking eastern Nord-Kivu province near the border with Rwanda for weeks.
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/ 26 November 2007
Kenya has offered asylum to nearly two dozen Somali refugees, yielding to opposition to its plans to deport them to violence-torn Mogadishu, officials said on Monday. A military truck transported the 22 refugees from Nairobi to Kenya’s north-eastern Dadaab refugee camp on Saturday after the government dropped plans to deport them.
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/ 26 November 2007
A rising tide of travellers seeking out the new frontier of Egyptian tourism is threatening priceless rock art preserved for millennia in one of the most-isolated reaches of the Sahara. In Egypt’s south-west corner, straddling the borders of Sudan and Libya, the elegant paintings of prehistoric man and beast in the mountains of Gilf Kabir and Jebel Ouenat are as stunning in their simplicity as anything by Picasso.
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/ 25 November 2007
Incoming Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, has pledged closer Australian ties with overseas allies and unity at home after ending 11 years of conservative rule under John Howard. Rudd (50) has promised to pull Australian troops out of Iraq and sign the Kyoto Protocol.
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/ 24 November 2007
Selina Akello sits in a clearing between the mud huts in her village. ”I will tell you anything,” she says. An older man passes within earshot, but she does not falter. This conversation would have been impossible a few years ago; Akello has the disease that used to be called ”slim” because people wasted away. Now it is called HIV/Aids.
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/ 24 November 2007
Lebanon edged closer to chaos on Friday when President Emile Lahoud ordered the army to take charge of security after political rivalries blocked the election of his successor hours before his term expired. The pro-Syrian head of state said the country risked descending into a state of emergency.
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/ 23 November 2007
The Commonwealth’s biennial summit opened on Friday in Uganda with leaders focusing on climate change, a day after Pakistan, which is still under emergency rule, was suspended from the organisation. The loose federation of mostly former British colonies includes some of the world’s major polluters.
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/ 23 November 2007
World oil prices fell on Friday after a momentous week that saw record peaks close to $100 as traders worried about tight energy supplies and geopolitical jitters in key producer countries. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for January delivery, sank 95 cents to $96,34 per barrel. The contract had hit an historic $99,29 on Wednesday.
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/ 23 November 2007
Explosions and machine-gun fire echoed through the hills of east Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Friday, as government troops battled rebels for a third day amid a worsening humanitarian crisis that has displaced nearly 200 000 people in the past few months, a United Nations military spokesperson said.
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/ 22 November 2007
It may only be a short walk from its bustling neighbour Sake, but Kimoka is a ghost town. Homes are abandoned, the school is deserted and the brand-new church empty. Light streams in through the open door on to huge leather drums beside the pulpit. When the congregation fled, the drums became redundant.
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/ 22 November 2007
United Nations peacekeepers will help the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) army disarm eastern dissident groups by force in violence-plagued North Kivu province, UN and Congolese commanders said. Army soldiers and fighters loyal to renegade Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda clashed again on Thursday a few kilometres from Rutshuru.
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/ 22 November 2007
Lack of proper toilet facilities and sanitation kills almost two million people a year, most of them children, the World Toilet Association said at its first meeting on Thursday. ”It is regrettable that the matter of defecation is not given as much attention as food or housing,” said Sim Jae-duck, the association’s South Korean head.
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/ 22 November 2007
Fighting flared in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s powder keg east on Wednesday, as the army battled insurgent troops after killing 20 rebel soldiers who staged a pre-dawn attack. Men loyal to cashiered general Laurent Nkunda launched a raid on an army position near Rutshuru, the headquarters of an eponymous district in the troubled Nord-Kivu province.
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/ 22 November 2007
Holding up a grubby, worn banknote, the ex-rebel fighter points proudly to an image famous across Eritrea — defiant liberation soldiers raising a flag on a mountain peak. It’s 10 years this month since Africa’s youngest nation enthusiastically launched its own currency in November 1997, the nakfa.
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/ 22 November 2007
The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into Taliban hands, according to a report by an independent think tank with long experience in the area. There is no sign of any move within Nato to send reinforcements to Afghanistan.