After driving them eight hours north to Bloemfontein, the recruiter sold them to a Nigerian drug and human-trafficking syndicate in exchange for $120 and crack cocaine. “[The recruiter] said we could find a job,” Sindiswa recalled, “but as soon as we got here, she told us, ‘No. You have to go into the streets and [...]

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Why the U.N.-sanctioned system that’s supposed to ensure that gemstones aren’t mined at gunpoint is backfiring.
“Conflict diamonds,” also known as “blood diamonds,” are rough stones mined at gunpoint by slaves and prisoners for the enrichment of those holding the weapons. They were a cause célèbre at the beginning of the decade, when human rights groups [...]

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Farmland in developing countries has become an unlikely object of investor fascination. Goldman Sachs (GS), and Morgan Stanley (MS) are each raising hundreds of millions of dollars for agriculture funds aimed at Africa and Latin America. Agribusinesses in the U.S. are leasing vast tracts of African land from which they expect to export crops and [...]

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In an effort to stem the surge, unmanned U.S. military surveillance planes called MQ-9 Reapers stationed on the island nation of Seychelles are being deployed to patrol the Indian Ocean in search of pirates, Moeller told The Associated Press in an interview at command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. The patrols began this week, military officials [...]

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It sounds like a communist utopia, but a basic income program pioneered by German aid workers has helped alleviate poverty in a Nambian village. Crime is down and children can finally attend school.
Only the local white farmers are unhappy.The full, red Namibian sun is setting outside his living room window, the workers are returning [...]

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It doesn’t look like he will. Just four months in office, Zuma has done so much worthy of obloquy that’s it’s a small miracle Clinton would even meet with him. He is peddling arms to police states and terrorist havens (in deals that were revealed just a week before Clinton’s arrival); continuing, as Mbeki did, [...]

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LAGOS, Nigeria — Remember that Nigerian prince who contacted you a few months back, saying he’d pay you to help transfer his inheritance to the United States?
All he needed was your bank account details, and you’d be well on the way to riches — or at least on the way to seeing your riches siphoned [...]

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