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/ 7 September 2007
A British diplomatic source in Harare has described reports that China is scaling down its presence in Zimbabwe as a "gross exaggeration". China has moved in to fill the vacuum left in Zimbabwe by the West and has signed a number of agreements and secured several trade deals.
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/ 7 September 2007
This week, in a rare victory for the barrier’s critics, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the government to reroute the barrier away from Bil’in in Palestine, which should eventually allow villagers to reclaim some of the large slice of their farmland that has been cut off from them for nearly three years.
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/ 7 September 2007
Benazir Bhutto has been doing the rounds of the television studios announcing her imminent return to Pakistan. Representing herself as the face of Pakistani liberal democracy, she has had an astonishingly smooth ride from interviewers, few of whom seemed to be aware of her deeply flawed record, writes William Dalrymple.
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/ 7 September 2007
After a three-month stand-off between rebel General Laurent Nkunda and the Congolese army, the situation in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has, over the past week, slipped into an open conflict between the two camps, with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the DRC helping out on the government’s side.
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/ 7 September 2007
If continuing talks between Telkom, Vodafone and MTN materialise into a deal where Telkom offloads its 50% stake in mobile partner Vodacom, valued at between R70-billion and R75-billion, Dimension Data chairperson Andile Ngcaba and other Elephant Consortium partners stand to be handsomely rewarded.
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/ 7 September 2007
A 12-year study by the World Bank using new technology has found that African countries flare enough gas each year — 40-billion cubic metres (BCM) — to power half the continent’s electricity needs if put to productive use. Just one country, Nigeria, flares 23 BCM annually.
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/ 7 September 2007
It seems so very long ago. On April 6 2003, the day the city of Basra was finally occupied by British troops, there was a febrile, uncertain sense of excitement. On Monday, the British soldiers followed the same route, as they retreated from Basra Palace in the city centre to relocate to the air base outside the city.
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/ 7 September 2007
A week into the floor-crossing period, the African National Congress’s power goes unchallenged. In the defection period that is killing off smaller opposition parties such as the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and the United Independent Front, a low-intensity war is raging in Cape Town.
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/ 7 September 2007
The surprise resolution of the case of Gerhard Wisser — the South African resident implicated in a secret ring of nuclear technology smugglers — has paved the way for further international trials of people involved in the so-called ”Khan network”. The trial of Wisser and his co-accused, Dieter Geiges, was expected to last up to three years.
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/ 7 September 2007
What’s in the top-secret report that former spy boss Billy Masetlha finally got his hands on this week? The National Intelligence Agency will not say what is in the report. Through the state prosecutor, the agency opposed Masetlha’s request for access to the document to support his defence against a fraud charge.