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/ 21 November 2007
South Africa was experiencing a possible decline of new HIV infections, Health Director General Thami Mseleku said on Wednesday. Speaking on the same day as the release of a United Nations report stating that South Africa had the highest prevalence of HIV in the world, Mseleku said there were signs that there was a turnaround in the number of new infections.
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/ 21 November 2007
Eritrea said on Wednesday arch-foe Ethiopia had ”long since declared war” on Asmara by refusing to implement a five-year-old border ruling marking their shared frontier. Analysts and diplomats fear heightened tensions on the Horn of Africa rivals’ frontier could erupt into a new conflict seven years after they fought a war.
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/ 21 November 2007
China has committed to sending an engineering unit of peacekeepers to Darfur at the end of the week, the top United Nations peacekeeping official said on Wednesday. China has about 1 800 peacekeepers deployed abroad, making it the second-largest contributor after France.
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/ 21 November 2007
The Guinea Bissau Cabinet on Tuesday sacked heads of the national radio and television on Tuesday for allegedly failing to send reporters to cover an address by the president. But the two denied claims their teams were not at the event and strongly protested their dismissal as too severe.
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/ 21 November 2007
A former child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war was named an ambassador for the United Nations children’s agency on Tuesday, vowing to be an advocate for children worldwide, not just in African war zones. Ishmael Beah lost his family in a rebel attack at about age 12 and and was forced to fight a deadly war.
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/ 21 November 2007
More than three-quarters of Aids-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa — and South Africa is now officially the country with the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. The South African government currently estimates about 5,5-million of the country’s 48-million people are living with the disease.
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/ 20 November 2007
The number of Somalis uprooted by fighting in their own country has hit a ”staggering” one million, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said 600 000 people are believed to have fled Somalia’s lawless capital, Mogadishu, since February.
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/ 20 November 2007
South Africa urged rich countries on Tuesday to provide the hardware required for the deployment of a hybrid United Nations-Africa peacekeeping force in the strife-torn Darfur region of western Sudan. The Darfur conflict between rebels and a pro-government militia has claimed an estimated 200 000 lives in the past four years.
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/ 20 November 2007
Aid workers are calling it Africa’s biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia. The slender 23-year-old’s son Mohamed died of hunger. So did her daughter Isha. ”I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet,” she says, gently cradling the wizened face of Muhiadeen, her four-month-old son.
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/ 20 November 2007
Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) said on Tuesday it would push ahead with talks to end two decades of conflict with the government despite the expulsion of some of its fighters. The LRA is notorious for its brutal methods of attacking civilians, slicing body parts off survivors and kidnapping children to serve as fighters and sex slaves.
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/ 20 November 2007
No prizes for guessing the least popular and most hassled men at Camp Striker near Baghdad. That would be the staff at Magic Island Technologies, who last week switched off the camp’s free wi-fi internet access. It may surprise to some to know that there is any internet access at an army camp inside a warzone.
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/ 20 November 2007
An internal United Nations report has alleged that bodyguards protecting powerful Afghan politicians opened ”indiscriminate fire” on a crowd in the aftermath of a suicide bombing two weeks ago, killing dozens of people including women and children.
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/ 20 November 2007
A commander and several fighters from Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have deserted the movement to escape a treason probe for allegedly collaborating with the government, a spokesperson said on Monday. The group fled in October from the LRA’s hideout along the Sudan-Democratic Republic of Congo border.
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/ 20 November 2007
Urgently needed supplies of food, water and medicine were on Tuesday nearing people in remote areas of Bangladesh where a devastating cyclone has left millions homeless and thousands dead. With roads now cleared of hundreds of trees that had blocked aid convoys, officials said relief was finally starting to get through to the most inaccessible areas.
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/ 20 November 2007
The United Nations has slashed its estimates of how many people are infected with HIV/Aids, from nearly 40-million to 33-million. In a report to be issued on Tuesday, the UN says revised estimates on HIV in India account for a large part of the decrease.
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/ 19 November 2007
Former Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan was formally detained and charged on Monday with war crimes and crimes against humanity by Cambodia’s United Nations-backed genocide tribunal, a court spokesperson said. "The co-investigating judges have detained him for a period of one year," tribunal spokesperson Reach Sambath said.
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/ 19 November 2007
Chinese Defence Minister General Cao Gangcuan on Monday pledged to help Kenya modernise its armed forces during talks with President Mwai Kibaki, an official statement said. Kibaki said the ”support would not only improve the forces’ ability to ensure security along the borders but also enhance Kenya’s role in peacekeeping activities in Africa and beyond”.
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/ 19 November 2007
South Africa is a leader in how human rights issues are dealt with at the United Nations, the Department of Foreign Affairs said on Sunday. The department was responding to a Sunday Times report that the country’s human rights reputation was ”in tatters” after a series of ”sell-out” votes.
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/ 19 November 2007
Africa is the ”forgotten continent” in the fight against climate change and needs help to cope with projected water shortages and declining crop yields, the United Nations’s top climate change official said on Sunday. Yvo de Boer said that damage projected for Africa by the UN climate panel would justify tougher world action to slow global warming.
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/ 18 November 2007
Former southern rebels on Sunday accused Sudan’s president of ”threatening and calling for war” in speech he gave in honour of a government-allied militia charged with a string of atrocities. Pagan Amum, Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, said he deplored the comments by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
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/ 18 November 2007
Sudan’s president said on Saturday he would not budge ”an inch” on the contested borders of the oil-rich Abyei region. Khartoum and former southern rebels the Southern People’s Revolutionary Movement (SPLM) are divided over the demarcation of Abyei, the source of much of Sudan’s energy reserves.
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/ 17 November 2007
Governments must do more to fight global warming, spurred by a new United Nations scientific report and damage to nature that is already as frightening as science fiction, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday. Ban said that he had just been on a trip to see ice shelves breaking up in Antarctica and the melting Torres del Paine glaciers in Chile.
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/ 17 November 2007
Military ships and helicopters were trying on Saturday to reach thousands of survivors of a super cyclone that killed nearly 1 100 people and pummelled impoverished Bangladesh with mighty winds and waves. Cyclone Sidr smashed into the country’s southern coastline late on Thursday night with 250km/h winds that whipped up a 5m tidal surge.
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/ 17 November 2007
Sudan added to the international row over Zoe’s Ark on Friday, accusing Paris of having furnished visas to the French charity to fly 103 children out of Chad, before the Chadian authorities intervened. Sudan’s humanitarian aid commissioner Mohamed Abdel Rahman Hassabo also accused the United Nations agencies working in the region
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/ 17 November 2007
A United Nations climate conference agreed on Friday a blueprint for fighting global warming and said governments have only a few years to avert some of the worst impacts. Delegates at the 130-nation talks stood and applauded after chairperson Rajendra Pachauri brought down the gavel on the November 12 to 17 meeting in Valencia, Spain, that wraps up six years of work.
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/ 17 November 2007
Africa requires massive investment in its failing energy sector to boost economic growth and meet its goal of halving poverty, a United States-Africa business summit heard on Friday. Emerging economies required a 16% increase in energy to drive every 10% of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, said Andrew Fawthrop, Chevron energy company’s Nigerian vice-president.
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/ 16 November 2007
A special Rwandan commission handed over on Friday a 500-page report on France’s alleged role in the country’s 1994 genocide, the commission’s president said. Paris has already rejected the competency of the commission of historians and jurists tasked to assemble evidence of France’s role in Rwanda’s genocide.
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/ 16 November 2007
Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma promised ”zero tolerance” on Thursday for corruption in his country after a leaked government report said rampant official graft had swallowed up donor funds. Speaking at his formal inauguration in Freetown, the 54-year-old former insurance executive called for a change of attitude in the West African state.
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/ 16 November 2007
Use of cocaine by celebrities is encouraging a trade that destroys whole communities in Latin America and Africa, the United Nations’ top anti-crime official said on Thursday. ”All these celebrity role models, turned into junkies, have in fact spent a lot of time in rehab lately, and their lives are a mess,” said Antonio Maria Costa.
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/ 16 November 2007
The breakaway province of Kosovo holds a parliamentary election on Saturday, ahead of a showdown with Serbia over the ethnic Albanian majority’s demand for independence. Prime Minister Agim Ceku is stepping down, so the election will bring in new leadership.
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/ 15 November 2007
A planned United Nations-African Union peace force for Darfur could fail unless disputes with Sudan over its make-up are resolved and key specialised units found. The 26 000-member force aims to bring security to the western Sudanese region after four-and-a-half years of conflict.
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/ 15 November 2007
Nigerian police have killed 785 suspected armed robbers in the past three months and lost 62 of their own men, the national chief of police was reported as saying on Thursday. Human rights groups and United Nations experts have accused Nigerian police of killing robbery suspects instead of arresting them.