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/ 19 October 2006
United States President George Bush has staked out a bold claim to the final frontier, asserting vigorously the country’s right to deny access to space to any adversary hostile to US interests. Bush outlined the importance of space to the national interest, saying its domination is as crucial to to their defences as air or sea power.
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/ 19 October 2006
An official inquiry into the killing of 193 unarmed protesters during the Ethiopian election has found that the victims were shot, beaten and strangled to death in a ”massacre” by the security forces. But the government is trying to suppress the report on the killings, according to a senior member of the inquiry team.
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/ 19 October 2006
Their prose did much to expose the moral bankruptcy of apartheid to the outside world but the literary elite of white South Africa has now turned ferociously on the rainbow nation’s new rulers. Following the departure of Nobel laureate JM Coetzee to Australia, authors such as André Brink, Rian Malan and Christopher Hope have delivered searing indictments of the state of the nation.
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/ 19 October 2006
We at the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> are developing an unhealthy relationship with Court 6 E of the Johannesburg High Court. The court orderlies know us well. Too well. Last Saturday, we were interdicted for the third time in a year and a half.It is an irony that the interdict, brought by the South African Broadcasting Corporation to make us take down a copy of the commission report into blacklisting off our website, came just four days before press freedom day.
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/ 19 October 2006
The blaze of publicity surrounding Madonna’s whirlwind adoption of a 13-month-old Malawian boy and her plans to create a facility to care for 4 000 orphans have raised deeper questions about how best to care for Africa’s vulnerable children. By 2010, there will be 18-million African children who will have lost at least one parent to Aids, according to estimates by the United Nations.
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/ 19 October 2006
The Department of Minerals and Energy could implement a retail petrol-price cut of about nine cents per litre (c/l) on November 1 2006, provided the daily over-recovery remains at or above the October 18 level. This would bring the total cut to 95c/l since the retail petrol price peaked at R7,04 a litre in August in Gauteng.
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/ 19 October 2006
How the clot-plot clots. City Press reported that Eskom had suffered a R129-million loss in ”questionable circumstances”. On Tuesday the utility company called the report an ”unwarranted attack”, but admitted in the same breath that criminal investigations were imminent. And there was Lemmer thinking there weren’t any more loose nuts rattling around in Eskom. (Did someone say sabotage?)
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/ 19 October 2006
The seven bison on display in a fenced enclosure at Oklahoma’s Chikasaw National Recreation Area hardly evoke the teeming hordes that once stretched to the horizon. But some ecologists hope that they can reintroduce bison to the wild in parts of the American West.
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/ 18 October 2006
Former president FW de Klerk congratulated South Africa and the foreign ministry for being elected to the United Nations Security Council. In a statement on Wednesday, De Klerk said the overwhelming vote that South Africa received in the UN’s general assembly was an indication of the esteem in which the country was held in the international community.