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/ 4 September 2007
Members of the Vukuzenzele Crisis Committee in Alexandra on Tuesday occupied a construction site in the northern Johannesburg township to protest against a lack of service delivery and housing. The committee’s chairperson, Frieda Dlamini, told the Mail & Guardian Online that people are desperate for houses.
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/ 4 September 2007
Petrol shortages mean long and chaotic lines at bus stops for Zimbabwean commuters. On Tuesday, they learned that once they manage to board a bus, chances are 50-50 the driver is unsafe or unlicensed. The Transport Ministry gave driving tests to 9 674 public transport drivers and nearly half failed.
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/ 4 September 2007
Severe floods across West Africa have killed at least 87 people, most of them in Nigeria, over the past two months, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Tuesday. Weather conditions worsened considerably in August, with areas of hard-hit northern Togo difficult to reach because bridges were swept away by heavy rains.
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/ 4 September 2007
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel has ruled out fixing the price of bread in South Africa. ”If we try and cap prices here we will create all manner of difficulties for ourselves,” he told MPs in the National Assembly on Tuesday. Manuel was responding to a call from Pan Africanist Congress MP Motsoko Pheko to fix the bread price.
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/ 4 September 2007
The South Africa National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) has expressed ”alarm” at the apparent attempted assassination of a newspaper editor last month. ”Though it has no evidence that this was an assassination attempt, the fact that Media24 has taken precautions based on that assumption requires the media industry to sound a stern warning,” Sanef said on Tuesday.
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/ 4 September 2007
Hurricane Felix slammed into Nicaragua’s Miskito Coast as a record-setting category-five monster storm on Tuesday, whipping metal rooftops through the air like razors and forcing thousands to flee. Meanwhile, off Mexico’s Pacific coast, Hurricane Henriette bore down on upscale resort Cabo San Lucas.
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/ 4 September 2007
A divorced father of four was sent to jail for 25 years by the Grahamstown High Court on Tuesday for raping and sodomising a mentally-ill girl of 13. ”The crimes were as bestial as they were heinous,” Judge Andre Erasmus told 44-year-old Mlandeli Mvandaba, of Zola township, Bathurst.
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/ 4 September 2007
Officials from soccer’s governing body, Fifa, will visit Zimbabwe next week to assess capacity to host fans from the 2010 World Cup to be held in neighbouring South Africa, Zimbabwe’s tourism authority said on Tuesday. The country hopes to cash in on its proximity to South Africa — the first African country to host the event.
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/ 4 September 2007
Microsoft says it will release a major package of updates and fixes for the Windows Vista operating system in the first half of 2008. The company says a ”beta” test version of Service Pack 1 will be released ”in a few weeks to a moderate-sized audience”. The pack fixes some common problems that cause computers to crash or freeze.
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/ 4 September 2007
Employers should allow their workers to befriend, chat and ”poke” each other through online networking sites while at work, Britain’s largest labour federation says. The Trades Union Congress says a ban on sites such as Facebook and MySpace ”may be something of an overreaction”.