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/ 20 February 2007
Gunmen kidnapped two Croatian and one Montenegrin oil worker from a bar in Nigeria’s oil city Port Harcourt, authorities said on Monday. The abduction in the city’s Iwofe district on Sunday night was the latest in a series of attacks against foreign workers in the world’s eighth largest oil exporter.
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/ 20 February 2007
In early February, Zimbabwe broke a 13-match losing sequence by beating Bangladesh, leaving their record going into the World Cup standing at 15 defeats in 16 matches. All of those defeats were against Kenya, Bangladesh and South Africa’s second string and included a 5-0 whitewash in Bangladesh at the end of 2006.
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/ 20 February 2007
French nuclear power companies are circling power utility Eskom, hoping to get in on the construction of the next conventional nuclear plant in the Western Cape. Industry speculation is that the Areva company is prepared to take a stake in the development of the fourth-generation pebble-bed modular reactor programme.
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/ 20 February 2007
Less than a year after appointing a team to investigate the potential for windfall taxes on South Africa’s liquid-fuel industry, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel is expected to announce details on the issue. In his mini budget speech last October, Manuel said he had received a comprehensive report from the team.
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/ 20 February 2007
South Africans should not expect large-scale tax relief in this year’s budget. It is likely that the focus will instead fall on social spending with, among others, the planned national pension fund and possibly a basic income subsidy as the core issues, notwithstanding the fact that room for tax relief for individuals does, in fact, exist.
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/ 20 February 2007
"Patch Tuesday", when Microsoft releases repairs for problems in its software, came and went last week with six critical fixes — including the first one that touches Vista, the new operating system billed as the most secure Windows version yet. This isn’t to say that Vista had previously appeared clean.
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/ 20 February 2007
President Thabo Mbeki will meet senior executives of FirstRand in Pretoria on Tuesday, South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported. Mbeki and the executives were expected to discuss the bank’s controversial campaign against crime, which was withdrawn at the last minute.
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/ 20 February 2007
The man tipped as most likely to succeed Tony Blair as Britain’s next prime minister suffered a blow on Tuesday when a newspaper poll showed voters far preferred the leader of the main opposition party. Asked which party they would back in a future election, just 29% said the governing Labour Party if — as expected — it was led by Finance Minister Gordon Brown.
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/ 20 February 2007
The three agencies that conducted a joint investigation into the multibillion-rand arms deal are to meet again on March 12 to decide if they need to investigate new claims of corruption, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Tuesday.
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/ 20 February 2007
With a pink hat and a broad smile, Jackie Kennedy looks out on the crowd gathered in downtown Dallas, only 90 seconds before the assassination that was to change the United States. You may think you’ve seen it before, but this image comes from a newly-discovered home movie handed into a Texas museum and released for the first time on Monday.