Nigerian group says British hostage freed

A Nigerian militant group said Friday that it has freed a British hostage. It could be the description of almost any young girl growing up in Europe. But this is how Eva Schloss remembers her childhood friend Anne Frank, who had not died in a Nazi concentration camp, would have celebrated her 80th birthday this week.

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Can Democrat Creigh Deeds Win the Race for Virginia Governor?

One candidate is from western Virginia — so far west, in fact, it’s closer to Charleston, West Virginia and Greensboro, North Carolina than to Washington D.C. — who promotes his rural, pro-gun values and aw-shucks humble persona, and is named for his Confederate grandfather. The other moved to the D.C.

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In Africa, the Death of a Big Man Is Reminder of Continent’s Worst Excesses

As Gabon begins a month of mourning and condolences pour in for President Omar Bongo, the world’s longest serving President, who died on Monday at 73 in his 42nd year in power, it’s worth remembering that Bongo was precisely the kind of leader Gabon, and Africa, could have done without. Gabon has a tiny population and vast oil reserves, and after four decades of exporting hundreds of billions of dollars of crude, the biggest testament to the corruption and ineptitude of Bongo’s rule is that he somehow contrived not to turn his country into an African Kuwait. A third of all Gabonese still live on less than $2 a day, and as the oil fields begin to dry up, Bongo’s subjects are facing up to the reality that he sacrificed the country’s future to fund his own fantastically opulent lifestyle.

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Shell to pay $15.5 million to settle Nigeria claims

Oil company Royal Dutch Shell will pay $15.5 million to settle a lawsuit against its Nigerian subsidiary by the family of executed Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and other dissidents, the plaintiffs announced Monday. The lawsuit accuses Shell of complicity in the 1995 hanging of Saro-Wiwa and the killings or persecution of other environmental activists by the military government that ruled the country at the time

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