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/ 29 December 2005
The prices of most grades of petrol, diesel and illuminating paraffin would decrease from one minute past midnight on January 4, the Department of Minerals and Energy announced on Thursday. The retail price of 93 unleaded petrol and lead replacement petrol would decrease by six cents a litre from R5,42 to R5,36.
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/ 29 December 2005
Education Minister Naledi Pandor was disappointed on Thursday at the 68,3% pass rate recorded by the 2005 matric class. ”I’m not satisfied,” she told a media briefing in Cape Town where the figure was announced. ”How can anyone be satisfied when more than 30% of our children are failing? Surely you can’t have that. I’m not happy.”
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/ 29 December 2005
At least 30 Yemenis were killed in an overnight landslide which hit a village on a rocky slope near the capital Sanaa. There are approximately 100 people still missing, an interior ministry official said on Thursday. Yemen’s Saba official news agency said that 25 out of the village’s 31 houses were destroyed and were buried under huge piles of rocks
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/ 29 December 2005
France on Wednesday joined other Western donors and cancelled 100% of Zambia’s bilateral debt totaling €173-million. The cancellation followed Zambia reaching the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in April 2005.
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/ 29 December 2005
Three decades of attempts to deliver justice to a man accused of being a guard in Nazi concentration camps took a new twist on Wednesday when a United States judge ordered the deportation of John Demjanjuk, an 85-year-old retired car factory worker.
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/ 29 December 2005
South and North Korea on Wednesday opened cross-border commercial communications lines for the first time since their division in 1945, officials said. The links were activated in a ceremony attended by North and South Korean government officials at an industrial zone in North Korea’s border city of Kaesong, the information ministry in Seoul said.
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/ 29 December 2005
The early arrival of off-spinner Johan Botha to join the South African cricket tour may lead to a call-up for next week’s final Test against Australia in Sydney. Botha (23) is a member of the Proteas’ squad for next month’s triangular one-day series with Australia and Sri Lanka and has yet to play Test cricket.
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/ 29 December 2005
Israeli artillery batteries and warplanes continued to bombard the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday after a deadline expired for Palestinians to evacuate a new security zone which is intended to stop rocket attacks, a military spokesperson said.
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/ 29 December 2005
Operations by govermment troops, backed by United Nations forces, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo have killed 86 Ugandan rebel fighters, the UN said on Wednesday. Six members of the goverment forces, the FARDC, and one Indian UN peacekeeper had also died, a spokesperson for the UN told reporters in Kinshasa.
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/ 29 December 2005
Sri Lanka’s return to New Zealand to complete a limited-overs cricket series interupted by last year’s Asian tsunami will bring back painful memories, the touring players say. The Sri Lankan team was engaged in the first of five limited-overs matches against New Zealand on December 26 2004, when earthquake-churned walls of water crashed into a dozen nations on the Indian Ocean rim.