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/ 18 January 2007
Fancy a new quad bike, a laptop with printer, television, hi-fi, DVD player, camera, home theatre system, PlayStation, Xbox 360, skottel braai, pair of sunglasses or Game shopping vouchers? In the rush to capture new cellphone customers in the saturated South African market, operators and service providers are bundling expensive free gifts with contracts to entice new subscribers.
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/ 18 January 2007
Zimbabwe’s refusal to renew the passport of newspaper owner Trevor Ncube — publisher of the Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent in that country and the Mail & Guardian in South Africa — is an assault on his freedom of expression and movement, the Zimbabwe National Editors’ Forum said on Thursday.
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/ 18 January 2007
The lights went out in several parts of South Africa on Thursday morning as Eskom carried out load-shedding as its capacity was stretched by a surprise surge in consumption. Power plants failed, including Koeberg nuclear power station’s unit one, when the turbine tripped at 2.18am. ”There is a national alert,” said Eskom spokesperson Tony Stott.
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/ 18 January 2007
A prisoner’s empty eye socket and dead birds filled with methamphetamine have been used in some of the more unusual attempts to smuggle drugs to prisoners in New Zealand, a report said on Wednesday. Previous attempts included throwing tennis balls or fruit containing drugs over prison walls.
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/ 18 January 2007
Philanderers beware: spouses caught cheating in Michigan could end up spending the rest of their life in prison — and not the emotional kind. The state’s appeals court recently ruled that extramarital flings can be prosecuted as first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in jail.
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/ 18 January 2007
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday said he was seeking permanent solutions to hostage-taking in the restive Niger Delta and denounced kidnaps as "criminality" that must not be allowed to go on. "Hostage-taking is not [due to] marginalisation, it is not lack of opportunity to air their views. It is simply criminality," Obasanjo told a presidential forum.
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/ 18 January 2007
A studio audience at a Chinese television programme showcasing priceless ancient relics was shocked when a crew member accidentally smashed a 2 500-year-old bronze mirror, state media reported. The small gilded mirror inlaid with turquoise was being held by a presenter’s assistant when it fell out of its wooden box.
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/ 18 January 2007
China will invest 1,5-trillion yuan (-billion) to make existing buildings more energy efficient by 2020 in a bid to save millions of tonnes of polluting coal, an official said on Thursday. Vice-Minister of Construction Qiu Baoxing said 350-million tonnes of coal could be saved in the next 15 years if existing buildings were renovated.
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/ 18 January 2007
Russian newspapers poured scorn on Thursday on a vast anti-terrorism operation launched nationwide on Wednesday, asking whether the whole scare was just an exercise or even a politically motivated trick. Several newspapers cast doubt on Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev’s claim to have received a foreign tip-off about an imminent attack on public transport.
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/ 18 January 2007
Zimbabwean authorities will block protests planned by the opposition against President Robert Mugabe’s bid to extend his nearly 27-year-rule, a senior minister was quoted as saying on Thursday. ”They have a programme of protests all the time,” Security Minister Didymus Mutasa told the privately owned Financial Gazette weekly.