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/ 29 December 2005
South Africa’s microfinance institutions face competition from loan sharks who prey on the vulnerable, especially in the townships where a majority of the country’s poor live. ”You still find loan sharks in the townships. They charge ridiculous rates like 100% a week. But a lot is being done to address it,” said Hennie Ferriera, chief executive officer of Micro Finance South Africa.
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/ 29 December 2005
South Africa’s rail utility, Spoornet, has already been paid R63 324 by a private security company for thefts which were carried out after the luxury Blue Train and Shosholoza Meyl crash between De Aar and Beaufort West in the Karoo on Wednesday October 26.
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/ 29 December 2005
A shaky truce that has marked a huge drop in Israeli-Palestinian violence during 2005 appears unlikely to be renewed at the year-end with armed factions accusing Israel of doing nothing in return. Transgressed repeatedly by the most radical Palestinians and endangered frequently by Israeli military operations, the de facto ceasefire has nonetheless put the brakes on a deadly cycle of violence since September 2000.
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/ 29 December 2005
Parts of Mthatha’s 540-bed Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital — including its operating theatres — were still without running water on Wednesday. The hospital’s difficulties were due partly to Mthatha’s general water supply problems, and partly to a succession of pipe bursts, Oliver Tambo District Municipality community services director Chauke Ngoma said.
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/ 29 December 2005
The Eastern Cape health department has hit back at a traditional leader who claimed it had incurred the wrath of the ancestors by meddling in the circumcision ritual. Contralesa provincial chairperson chief Mwelo Nonkonyana was quoted on Wednesday as saying the 18 circumcision-related deaths so far this summer season meant the department had ”dismally failed”.
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/ 29 December 2005
Philippine security forces have been ordered to tape over the barrels of their guns to dissuade them from firing into the air to welcome in the New Year, officials said on Thursday. Police and military officials said those found to have broken the tape seals over the New Year period without a valid explanation would be punished.
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/ 29 December 2005
The early arrival of off-spinner Johan Botha to join the South African cricket tour may lead to a call-up for next week’s final Test against Australia in Sydney. Botha (23) is a member of the Proteas’ squad for next month’s triangular one-day series with Australia and Sri Lanka and has yet to play Test cricket.
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/ 29 December 2005
Tense negotiations were under way on Wednesday night to try to secure the release of a British human rights worker and her parents, who were abducted in the Gaza Strip. The 25-year-old woman, identified as Kate Burton, was showing her parents around the town of Rafah near the Egyptian border when they were bundled into a car and driven off.
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/ 29 December 2005
Sri Lanka’s return to New Zealand to complete a limited-overs cricket series interupted by last year’s Asian tsunami will bring back painful memories, the touring players say. The Sri Lankan team was engaged in the first of five limited-overs matches against New Zealand on December 26 2004, when earthquake-churned walls of water crashed into a dozen nations on the Indian Ocean rim.
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/ 29 December 2005
South and North Korea on Wednesday opened cross-border commercial communications lines for the first time since their division in 1945, officials said. The links were activated in a ceremony attended by North and South Korean government officials at an industrial zone in North Korea’s border city of Kaesong, the information ministry in Seoul said.