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/ 13 January 2006
Bill Gates doesn’t like to lose. When the Microsoft chairperson and his chief executive, Steve Ballmer, played a game onstage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week recreating the classic fight of Muhammad Ali against George Foreman, it was Gates (as Ali) who won, and Ballmer who threw his controller to the floor.
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/ 13 January 2006
Women and children in arid north-eastern Kenya are begging along roadsides for water and food from motorists, the United Nations’s World Food Programme said on Friday as it appealed to donors to help about five million people affected by drought across East Africa.
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/ 13 January 2006
The JSE was marginally weaker in noon trade on Friday, taking its cue from world markets. A slightly softer rand and strength in retailers — which were boosted by a positive trading update from Foschini — pared the bourse’s losses. By 12.03pm, the all-share index shed 0,2%.
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/ 13 January 2006
Best know for its beaches and tourists, Durban has been quietly building its internet and intranet services using open-source tools, including Plone and Zope. Now that the project is done, developers and managers say it was a challenging task but one well worth the effort.
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/ 13 January 2006
The Turkish nationalist who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 was released from prison in Istanbul on Thursday, his motive for the attempted assassination still as opaque as ever. Mehmet Ali Agca (48) walked out of Kartal prison surrounded by police after serving more than 25 years in jail in Italy and Turkey for the plot against the pope and the murder of a left-wing journalist.
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/ 13 January 2006
After days of frenzied speculation, a television station claimed on Friday to have captured proof of reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il living it up at a luxury hotel in China. The grainy footage broadcast by Japan’s Nippon Television station in Tokyo showed a bespectacled man with Kim’s trademark bouffant hairstyle surrounded by men in black as he got out of a limousine.
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/ 13 January 2006
The last face on earth that condemned men see as they are strapped on to the gurney for their execution by lethal injection in the death chambers of the prisons in United States southern states is often that of a diminutive, grey-haired Catholic nun. She gazes into their eyes for as long as she can, trying to give them strength and show human compassion for their last few minutes.
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/ 13 January 2006
The Syrian government signalled on Thursday that it would allow United Nations investigators to talk to president Bashar Assad about the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri. The UN investigators are seeking to bring charges against senior members of the Syrian government suspected of implication in last year’s murder.
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/ 13 January 2006
Friday the 13th proved to be bad luck for the Tokyo stock market, which saw the latest in a series of mishaps. The Japanese investment banker Daiwa Securities SMBC mistakenly placed a sell order for 25 000 shares of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial instead of another firm after an employee interchanged the names.
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/ 13 January 2006
Indian vehicle manufacturer Tata, having quickly established itself as a leading player in the South African bus and truck market, is starting to make inroads into the car market. Tata’s distributor Accordian Investments launched its Indica and Indigo passenger vehicles in December 2004.