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/ 5 September 2007
With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman — until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body. The author of Yakuza Moon, Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.
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/ 5 September 2007
South Africa’s largely coal-driven power utility Eskom has hit the limits of its capacity and aims to double output by 2025, with nuclear plants supplying more than a quarter of future energy compared with 6% now. Eskom’s chief executive Jacob Maroga told a coal conference on Tuesday the state-owned firm would cut back on polluting coal-fired plants.
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/ 5 September 2007
Seven developing countries in Africa and Asia will be the first to take part in a new global health campaign aimed at directing aid more effectively at the basic needs of poor countries. Health ministers from Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, Cambodia and Nepal will take part in the launch of the initiative at British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office later on Wednesday.
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/ 5 September 2007
Hurricane Felix ripped into Central America on Tuesday, trashing a port on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, killing at least four people and threatening dangerous mudslides in Honduras and Guatemala. The storm, which hit land as a powerful category-five hurricane, ravaged Puerto Cabezas in northern Nicaragua, where howling winds tore the roofs off homes and shelters and damaged a church.
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/ 5 September 2007
Madonna has not used her celebrity status to speed up the adoption of a little boy from a Southern African country, her spokesperson said on Tuesday. Madonna’s effort to add Malawian toddler David Banda to her family again came under the spotlight on Monday, when the Malawian official scheduled to go to London to assess the adoption was removed from the case.
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/ 5 September 2007
Former South African president Nelson Mandela, in Paris on a private visit, met French President Nicolas Sarkozy for dinner at the Élysée Palace on Tuesday, Sarkozy’s spokesperson said. Sarkozy presented Mandela with a book of photographs from an early campaign of civil disobedience in 1952.
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/ 5 September 2007
In the wake of soccer player Gift Leremi’s death, the Department of Transport said the number of fatalities on the roads needed to be addressed. ”The department is very concerned about the high number of crashes and the resultant fatalities experienced lately on our roads,” it said in a statement.
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/ 5 September 2007
The Banking Association of South Africa is trying to have money it accidentally paid to a lobby group led by South African Communist Party head Blade Nzimande returned. The managing director of the Banking Association of South Africa, Cas Coovadia, confirmed that the industry body had accidentally paid its quarterly fees of R360Â 000 in June last year to the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition.
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/ 5 September 2007
Tariq Ramadan has an abundance of labels. And for the most part, he is reluctant to dismiss any of them outright. Because to the Swiss professor and self-styled Islamic reformer, they somehow always fit. In an interview with Khadija Bradlow, Ramadan stresses the need for Muslims to engage with broader society.
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/ 5 September 2007
"I know this might sound corny, but the sound of the Aston Martin Vantage Roadster’s V8 engine gave me indescribable pleasure. Yes, I’ve driven V8s, V10s and even a V12-engined vehicle before, but none has ever sounded as viciously sweet as this," writes Sukasha Singh.