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/ 2 November 2006
Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Wednesday hailed Portugal’s transfer of control of a huge hydroelectric plant to its former colony as the end of ”the final redoubt of foreign domination”. Guebuza signed an agreement with Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates late on Tuesday to buy 82% of shares in the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi river.
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/ 2 November 2006
United States President George Bush on Wednesday renewed US economic sanctions on Sudan for one year and left open the door to imposing new ones linked to the violence in Darfur. Washington "is prepared to pursue the designation of additional individuals that continue to commit violence and impede the peace process in Darfur", he said.
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/ 2 November 2006
It is a testament to the power of money that Nicholas Stern’s report should have swung the argument for drastic action, even before anyone has finished reading it. He appears to have demonstrated what many of us suspected: that it would cost much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it, writes George Monbiot.
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/ 2 November 2006
"I was arrested a dozen times," notes Tapera Kapuya, a student leader at the University of Zimbabwe between 2001 and 2002 who says he was the target of both police and the Southern African country’s intelligence agents. "In November 2001 I was abducted from my room in the university by state agents and tortured for three days," he told Inter Press Service in South Africa, where he lives in exile.
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/ 2 November 2006
It is important to place on record the kind of man and leader PW Botha really was. He was not "the great demolisher of apartheid", as one newsÂpaper commentator described him. Under mounting international pressure and internal dissent he did dismantle many discriminatory laws. But apartheid was never about segregation –it was about white minority power.
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/ 2 November 2006
South Africa has two choices in its economic future, but the Democratic Alliance feared the country was on the wrong course, party leader Tony Leon said on Wednesday. Addressing the South African Business Club in London, Leon said South Africa could retain market orthodoxy or go backwards towards a statist command economy based on an outmoded Stalinist model.
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/ 2 November 2006
I believe the hindsight of history will treat PW Botha much kinder than the quick appraisals following his death this week at his home in the Wilderness. For the image of a finger-wagging, self-righteous, smirking Groot Krokodil who defiantly refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is still too vivid in our collective memory, writes Dries van Heerden.
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/ 2 November 2006
It’s been tucked away on a governmental website for years, but this week Lemmer discovered for the first time a testimonial as surreal as it is shameless. Lemmer has blanked the name in question, so that his readers can play Guess the Minister. ”The true greatness of a person is measured by the impact that person has on the lives of others. This statement rings true for the Minister of X, who has touched the lives of many in different ways.”
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/ 2 November 2006
Somalia’s powerful Islamic movement on Thursday claimed Ethiopia had deployed about 12 000 troops to help the transitional government as tension soared in the shattered African nation. A day after peace talks aimed at averting an all-out war collapsed in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, the Islamists said Ethiopian forces were preparing an attack against them.
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