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/ 24 December 2007
A three-year-old Germiston toddler will spend Christmas recovering after being raped by a friend of the family, police said on Monday. Germiston police spokesperson Captain Steady Nawa said the child’s mother was preparing a meal on Sunday when she noticed that her daughter was missing.
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/ 24 December 2007
Heidelberg police are searching for the driver of a yellow Toyota Cressida that was involved in an accident in which one person died, Ekurhuleni police said on Sunday. The Toyota Cressida — bearing the number plate CJM 710 GP — collided with a white Hyundai three-tonne truck, leaving the driver of the truck dead.
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/ 24 December 2007
Sri Lankan troops killed 41 Tamil Tiger fighters in a series of weekend clashes in the island’s civil war-ravaged north, while three soldiers were also killed, the military said on Monday. Eleven rebels were killed in fighting in the northern districts of Vavuniya and Jaffna on Sunday, while another eight were killed in the north-western district of Mannar.
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/ 24 December 2007
Jacob Zuma, the new leader of the African National Congress said on Sunday that he would look at inflation targeting, a key monetary policy tool used by the Reserve Bank to reign in inflation. The country adopted the policy in 2000 as a framework through which the central bank estimates a ”target” inflation rate.
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/ 24 December 2007
The conduct of some African National Congress delegates at its conference in Polokwane last week showed they did not understand what the party stood for, President Thabo Mbeki has told the South African Broadcasting Corporation. He was disappointed at how little some people understood of the ANC’s political workings and policy implementation.
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/ 24 December 2007
Iran will soon announce an international tender for building 19 nuclear power plants, a week after Russia said it had begun fuel deliveries to the Islamic state’s first such facility. Kazem Jalali, a spokesperson for Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said each power plant would have a capacity of 1 000 megawatts.
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/ 24 December 2007
China has sanctioned state-owned companies to examine three possible strategies to block BHP Billiton’s proposed takeover of mining giant Rio Tinto, a report said Monday. Strategies include forming a domestic consortium to bid for Rio Tinto, a joint bid by domestic and foreign firms, or purchasing Rio shares on the open market.
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/ 24 December 2007
"A child if I want and when I want," reads the sign at the family-health centre in Niamey where dozens of Niger women come to get free contraceptives. "I was taking the pill without my husband’s knowledge," said Zahratou Amadou, a 38-year-old mother of 10. "When he found out he repudiated me."
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/ 24 December 2007
Worried that it may be seen as insensitive to the food needs of Africa, the South African government, which is facing a general election in 2009, has chosen food security in framing a biofuel policy. After months of dilly-dallying, a strategy for the biofuel sector was accepted by the Cabinet at the start of December.
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/ 24 December 2007
After almost a decade of poor cocoa production during the 1980s, the Ghanaian government is upbeat about the subsequent growth in output of the product that is the country’s main export, providing more than 60% of foreign earnings. Swollen-shoot disease remains a headache, though.