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afrol.com, 10 October - "The Chronicle" newspaper reports that a group of United Democratic Front (UDF) Young Democrats beat up a news vendor until he lost consciousness because he was selling the paper in Blantyre. The incident happened during the first week of October. UDF activists were out to buy all the copies of "The Chronicle" distributed in Blantyre, because "the paper has written bad things about the president". The vendor was admitted to hospital with head injuries. A close relative of the vendor told "The Chronicle" that the Young Democrats first demanded that the vendor sell them his entire lot of papers, but he refused, whereafter they rounded on him and beat him up. The assailants reportedly also threatened to find a "Chronicle" reporter who distributed the paper to the vendors and other selling joints in and around the city. Investigations by "The Chronicle" apparently revealed that all the newspapers that had been distributed to Times Bookshops had been bought by the same Young Democrats and later set ablaze. By Tuesday morning - the day after the weekly paper is published - all the Times Bookshops were short of the paper after it was bought by the Young Democrats. One vendor, who did not want his name published, was quoted as saying that the Young Democrats had "claimed that the paper has written bad things about the president". "The Chronicle" is currently facing the threat of lawsuits from President Bakili Muluzi and UDF vice president Aleke Banda, who is also Minister of Health and Population. This follows the publication of several stories detailing alleged corruption in government and the ruling party. On September 20, Muluzi, through his lawyers, wrote to "The Chronicle" demanding an apology and retraction of a story that appeared in the paper on September 18, or face the prospect of a legal claim for "substantial damages". The story in question claimed that Muluzi had been the mastermind behind a massive corruption scandal that involved the siphoning off of public monies to fund the UDF's election campaign in 1999. Neither a retraction nor an apology was published by the paper. Last week, Banda, also through his lawyers, wrote to the paper demanding an apology or retraction of a story that appeared on October 2 and which implicated him as having corruptly used public money to fund his election campaign, which he eventually lost. To date, both Muluzi and Banda have not instituted formal legal proceedings against the paper.
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