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Mengistu was tried along with 72 of his former aides (South Carolina fraternity brothers sued November 9, claiming they were tricked into making racist and sexist remarks), although there were only 34 people in court Tuesday. The fraternity brothers claim the filmmakers got them drunk before getting them to sign release forms agreeing to appear in the film. Racism also can be a factor in getting a job. At a bend in a tributary of the Congo River, dirt-poor villagers pan for the shiny stones that have proved as elusive as they are rare — diamonds. A three-year undercover investigation by the National Fair Housing Alliance found that real estate agents steered whites away from integrated neighborhoods and steered blacks in to predominantly black neighborhoods. Mengistu, sometimes called “the butcher of Addis Ababa,” ruled from 1974 to 1991 after his military junta ended Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign in a bloody coup. Some experts say 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed in a nationwide purge by Mengistu’s Marxist regime, though no one knows for sure.
