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/ 4 December 2007
The first South China tiger cub born in South Africa was shown to the media at the Laohu Valley Reserve in the southern Free State on Tuesday. The cub, not named yet, was born 11 days ago, weighing 1,2kg, and opened his eyes on Monday. The South China tiger is one of the most endangered species in the world.
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/ 4 December 2007
A Greek Orthodox nunnery was turned into a marijuana plantation by two men posing as gardeners for elderly nuns, police said on Tuesday. Acting on a tip-off, officers raided the nunnery in the village of Filiro, near the northern port city of Thessaloniki, and found more than 30 large cannabis plants in the enclosed garden.
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/ 4 December 2007
A delegation of the world’s elder statesmen on Tuesday called for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan’s Darfur and for the international community to urgently honour its pledge to send in a peacekeeping force. ”The future of Darfur, and indeed the whole of Sudan, sits on a knife-edge,” said a report following a fact-finding mission.
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/ 4 December 2007
In a further effort to protect South Africa’s fast-diminishing perlemoen stocks, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk has imposed a ban on scuba diving and snorkelling in certain areas along the Cape coast. The envisaged prohibition, subject to a process of public comment, will take effect from February 1 next year.
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/ 4 December 2007
Turmoil struck the Somali government on Tuesday as a fifth minister resigned in a power-sharing dispute a day after being appointed, and the president was urgently flown to a hospital in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. A security official described President Abdullahi Yusuf (72) as being in a ”serious condition” when he arrived in Nairobi on Tuesday.
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/ 4 December 2007
United States and German navy ships have cornered Somali pirates who seized a Japanese-owned chemical tanker more than a month ago and are demanding a ransom, an official said on Tuesday. The Panama-registered Golden Nori was carrying benzene from Singapore to Israel when it was hijacked on October 28.
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/ 4 December 2007
The South African Civil Aviation Authority and Nationwide Airlines have agreed to a media blackout regarding the grounding of the carrier. They said they would no longer make independent statements to the press, but would speak jointly on the process, it was announced on Tuesday.
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/ 4 December 2007
A 190-nation climate meeting in Bali took small steps towards a new global deal to fight global warming by 2009 on Tuesday amid disputes about how far China and India should curb rising greenhouse-gas emissions. Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’s top climate official, praised the December 3 to 14 meeting of 10 000 participants for progress.
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/ 4 December 2007
The City of Tshwane will be ready to host the 2010 Soccer World Cup spectacle, mayor Gwen Ramakgopa said on Tuesday. ”We are confident that we are on track,” she said. She was addressing journalists at a press-club briefing in Pretoria about the city’s readiness to host the event.
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/ 4 December 2007
The United Nations says the humanitarian crisis caused by last month’s cyclone in Bangladesh is much worse than previously thought, with more than two million people in need of immediate life-saving assistance. ”As more information becomes available, an even grimmer reality is being revealed,” the UN said on Tuesday.