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/ 22 December 2007
An Ariane 5 rocket blasted off in French Guiana on Friday to put into orbit the first African telecommunications satellite as well as another made by a United States-Japanese joint venture, Arianespace said. The rocket, the 36th launch of an Ariane 5 and the sixth this year, lifted off at 9.42pm GMT.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to wrap up the United Nations peacebuilding mission in Sierra Leone in September next year, praising this year’s peaceful and democratic elections in the West African nation and efforts to professionalise its armed forces.
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/ 22 December 2007
Representatives of Nepal’s gay community on Saturday welcomed a decision by the country’s Supreme Court that directed the government to formulate laws for legal recognition of sexual minorities. The laws are to stop discrimination against them, according to the court ruling made on Friday.
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/ 22 December 2007
A magnitude-4,8 earthquake rattled a New Zealand city on Saturday after it was hit by a powerful temblor earlier this week that resulted in millions of dollars in damage. Thursday’s 6,8-magnitude quake wrecked an apartment building and two shops in the port city of Gisborne, 50km from the quake’s epicentre.
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/ 22 December 2007
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Friday condemned the National Electricity Regulator for giving permission to Eskom to increase electricity prices by 14,2%. ”Poor households continue to face massive challenges in access to energy for basic household activities,” said spokesperson Patrick Craven.
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/ 22 December 2007
A 40-year-old man killed his wife and then handed himself over to police in Acornhoek, Mpumalanga police said on Friday. ”He took out a knife and stabbed her four times all over her body, and then he took a hammer and hit her on the back of her head,” said Superintendent Abie Khoabane.
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/ 22 December 2007
At least 10 people were killed and more than 20 injured in a collision when a bus ploughed into the trailer of a stationary truck near Estcourt in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands on Saturday morning, paramedics and the provincial road traffic inspectorate said. Of those injured, eight were in a critical condition.
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/ 22 December 2007
In many respects Desmond Makhanya (72) is the living memory of Adams College. When he attended the school in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was the fourth generation in his family to be educated at the mission school. His great grandfather, his grandmother and his mother were all alumni.
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/ 21 December 2007
What a country. Both our president-in-waiting and our police chief separately face the prospect of corruption and racketeering charges; our previous national director of public prosecutions was accused of once being an apartheid-era spy and all but hounded out of office for pursuing the first investigation; our current national director was suspended by the president for pursuing the second, writes Sam Sole.
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/ 21 December 2007
Writers on writing made up much of my best reading of the year, writes Darryl Accone.