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/ 17 October 2007
Former United States vice-president Al Gore said that he has no plan to join the US presidential race even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for urging global action to fight climate change. Gore, narrowly beaten by US President George Bush in the 2000 race, said that it was a ”great honour” to win the prestigious award.
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/ 17 October 2007
A delegation of rainforest pygmies from the Democratic Republic of Congo will fly to Washington this week to complain to the World Bank about its support for wholesale logging. The visit follows a leak of a report that criticised the bank for backing a number of logging projects without adequate consideration.
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/ 17 October 2007
Britain plans to submit a claim to the United Nations to extend its Antarctic territory by a million square kilometres, the foreign office said on Wednesday. The claim is one of five territorial requests planned by the Britain ahead of a May 2009 deadline and covers a vast area of the seabed around British Antarctica.
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/ 17 October 2007
A strike by 2 000 workers at Sasol, the world’s biggest maker of fuel from coal, entered its fourth day on Wednesday, reducing coal output at its mines, but fuel production was unaffected. The workers, a third of the workforce at the mines, downed their tools on Friday at the five coal mines in Secunda.
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/ 17 October 2007
The Frankfurt Book Fair has an indicator to help publishers gauge public interest in the new offerings presented at the annual exhibition — the unofficial ”most stolen book” index. ”The most-stolen books are usually the most-sold later on,” said Claudia Hanssen of the Goldmann Verlag publishing house.
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/ 17 October 2007
South Africa are confident of carrying their Test form into the five-match one-day series against Pakistan starting at Lahore’s Gadaffi stadium on Thursday. Having won the two-match Test series 1-0, skipper Graeme Smith and his men will be looking forward to maintaining a tradition of impressive one-day performances in Pakistan.
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/ 17 October 2007
Rickety old jeeps barrel through a dry northern Philippines riverbed, setting off a dust storm that coats the visitors bouncing around on the back seat. The landscape around Mount Pinatubo is evolving again 16 years after a gigantic volcanic eruption killed more than 1Â 500 people and sent a cloud of ash into the atmosphere cooling world temperatures for years.
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/ 17 October 2007
Toxicity results from the United States have raised concerns over last month’s explosion in the Durban Bluff area, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Tuesday. The containers in the Island View Storage facility possibly contained paraffin, alcohol, solvents and cresol.
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/ 17 October 2007
Archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known remains of human habitation at the coast, a finding that may explain how humans ventured beyond Africa at the start of their planetary odyssey. Mussel shells and stone micro-tools found in a sea cave in South Africa suggest that Homo sapiens headed for the beach quite soon after emerging from the savannah.
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/ 17 October 2007
Piracy off Somalia is on the rise because an Islamic group that had cracked down on pirates was ousted, an official who tracks piracy cases off Africa’s side of the Indian Ocean said. Earlier, an international watchdog reported maritime pirate attacks worldwide had shot up 14% in the first nine months of 2007.