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/ 18 July 2006

Golf cart politics divide G8 leaders

To ride in a golf cart or not to ride? That was the question driving a wedge between Group of Eight (G8) leaders even before they sat down for talks on Sunday. The G8 leaders were trying to bridge differences on the Middle East, energy and Iran’s nuclear programme. But on how to travel around the summit site they looked far apart.

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/ 18 July 2006

Crime writer Mickey Spillane dead at 88

Mickey Spillane, the crime novelist who created the tough-as-nails detective Mike Hammer, died on Monday at 88 at his home in South Carolina, said a mortuary employee. ”He died today,” said Josh Campbell of Goldfinch Funeral Home in Murrells Inlet in the south-eastern United States, without giving a cause of death.

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/ 18 July 2006

Doctor, your sponge is beeping

Technology that helps airlines keep track of luggage and sounds an alarm when a shoplifter tries to leave the store may be able to stop surgeons from losing a sponge inside a patient, a study said on Monday. An earlier study found that medical personnel left foreign objects, most often sponges, inside a patient’s body in one out of every 10 000 surgeries.

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/ 18 July 2006

Court hears that Malatsi lied to save own skin

Former Western Cape provincial minister of environment David Malatsi lied to a Scorpions investigator in order to save his own skin, the Bellville Regional Court was told on Tuesday. Malatsi — in the witness box for the fifth day in succession — was being questioned by prosecutor Bruce Morrison on a 234-page statement he gave to the Scorpions in 2003.

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/ 18 July 2006

Rockets fly as Israel pounds Lebanon

Israeli warplanes battered Lebanon on Tuesday, killing 26 people, and more Hezbollah rockets hit the Israeli city of Haifa, with no sign that diplomacy would halt the week-old conflict any time soon. Nine family members, including children, were killed and four wounded in an air strike on their house in the village of Aitaroun.

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/ 18 July 2006

World urges Sudan to accept UN force

World powers pressed Sudan on Tuesday to accept a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur to replace an ill-equipped African Union force that has been unable to stem the violence that Washington calls genocide. The UN and aid agencies also urged donors at talks in Brussels to finance the 7 000-strong AU force for a few more months.

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/ 18 July 2006

Ugandan rebels emerge from the undergrowth

For decades known mainly to the outside world for their dreadlocks, gumboots and kidnapping of children, Uganda’s brutal Lord’s Resistance Army has been Africa’s most mysterious rebel movement. But in recent weeks, the group has ventured out of jungle hideouts in an unprecedented bid to paint itself as a liberation movement.

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/ 18 July 2006

Sachin ready to return

India’s star batsman Sachin Tendulkar is set to return to international cricket in August after a four-month absence due to shoulder surgery, an official said on Tuesday. ”The report we have got from our physiotherapist John Gloster is that Sachin is fit to play,” Indian cricket board secretary Niranjan Shah told the media.