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/ 31 January 2007
President Robert Mugabe’s government should immediately sell more than a dozen state firms to help raise money for the embattled economy, Zimbabwe’s central bank governer said on Wednesday. The privatisation of loss-making state firms would yield up to -billion this year, easing a foreign-currency crunch, Gideon Gono said in a monetary policy statement.
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/ 31 January 2007
Somali lawmakers on Wednesday elected a former warlord as their new speaker, two weeks after firing his predecessor for brokering unauthorised peace talks with an Islamist movement. A day after President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed sought to rally support behind his embattled government, the MPs overwhelmingly endorsed Justice Minister Aden Mohamed Nur.
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/ 31 January 2007
Iran, accused by some Western nations of seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, on Wednesday denied a British newspaper report that North Korea was giving it technical help to fulfil its ambition. The United Nations Security Council voted to ban military supplies and weapons shipments to North Korea after Pyongyang carried out its first nuclear test in October.
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/ 31 January 2007
South Africa has been informed that more South Africans are to be listed on the United Nations Security Council list of terror suspects, Foreign Affairs Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad said on Wednesday. Pahad did not say which UN member country was planning the listing, when it would be done or how many South Africans would be listed.
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/ 31 January 2007
One of Zimbabwe’s foremost stone sculptors, Damian Manhuhwa, died from complications from a kidney ailment on January 23, friends and colleagues said. He was 54. Manhuhwa died at the main hospital in Harare and was buried on January 26 in his home area in the Rusape district, 170km east of the Zimbabwean capital.
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/ 31 January 2007
Youths participating in budget discussions have influenced state decisions in Brazil and free uniforms have upped school attendance in Kenya, reducing teenage child bearing, according to a World Bank report. The future could look brighter for the world’s youth with the implementation of such interventions, which are highlighted in the World Bank’s first report of the year.
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/ 31 January 2007
South Africa’s trade balance swung into surplus in December from a R10,5-billion deficit the previous month, official data showed on Wednesday. The surplus was far better than a Reuters survey forecast of a R2-billion deficit in December, although the data is volatile and unpredictable and December is traditionally a low import month.
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/ 31 January 2007
Supporters of African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma have hit back at the South African Communist Party’s Jeremy Cronin for saying they are unprincipled and inconsistent. ”Cronin is one of the people who have consciously continued to lie about Zuma and his supporters since the [Zuma’s] rape trial,” the Friends of Jacob Zuma Trust said on Wednesday.
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/ 31 January 2007
Crime affects more than eight out of ten businesses in South Africa, a survey has found. Eighty-four percent of medium-to-large privately held businesses in South Africa report that they, their staff or families of staff have been affected by personal contact crime over the past 12 months, according to Grant Thornton’s 2007 International Business Report.
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/ 31 January 2007
Retief Goosen has won the European Tour’s golfer-of-the-month award for January after a spectacular birdie-eagle finish clinched victory at the Qatar Masters. The South African took the honour ahead of Jo’burg Open winner Ariel Canete of Argentina, the tour said in a news release on Wednesday.