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/ 18 January 2006
In the corner of the dimly lit entrance hall of a Soviet housing block in the Warsaw suburb of Wolomin, housing Chechen refugees, a middle-aged man toys aimlessly with a large switchblade. Children’s voices ring down from the upper storeys of the building, home to between 200 and 300 Chechens who have fled the war in their north Caucasus homeland to end up at one of 17 refugee centres in Poland.
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/ 17 January 2006
Nasa prepared to launch an unmanned, piano-sized probe that will fly by Pluto, the solar system’s last unexplored planet, and also study a mysterious zone of icy objects that surrounds the frosty planet at the outer edges of the planetary system. The launch has drawn protests from anti-nuclear activists because the spacecraft will be powered by 11kg of plutonium.
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/ 17 January 2006
Aid agencies warned on Tuesday that they do not have money to feed millions of Kenyans suffering from food shortages. The warning came a day after Information and Communications Minister Mutahi Kagwe announced that the number of Kenyans at risk from the food crisis has increased to 3,5-million from 2,5-million.
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/ 17 January 2006
The South African National Blood Service is to initiate discussions with interested parties to resolve the challenges posed by its policy of excluding gay male donors, the health department said on Tuesday. The decision came after a meeting between the health department and the SANBS in Johannesburg on Tuesday morning.
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/ 17 January 2006
Leonard South, the camera operator on such classic Alfred Hitchcock films as The Birds and North by Northwest, has died. He was 92. South died on January 6 of pneumonia in a Northridge nursing home, said his son, film editor Leonard South II. The elder South had Alzheimer’s disease.
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/ 17 January 2006
Workers called to clean up blood were witnesses to the murder of three employees of Protea Dry Cleaners, the Vereeniging Magistrate’s Court heard on Tuesday. Opposing a bail application by the four accused, investigating officer Inspector Sello Molapisi said he believed the state had a strong case.
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/ 17 January 2006
A spokesperson for the Cable News Network (CNN) said on Tuesday the network was pleased that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has allowed it to resume operating in the country. Iran on Monday said it was banning CNN for mistakenly quoting Ahmadinejad as saying Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons.
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/ 17 January 2006
The presidency’s explanation for Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s taxpayer-funded private trip to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December was laughable, the Democratic Alliance said on Tuesday. ”The basic underlying fact remains that a trip was undertaken by the deputy president, her family and friends at taxpayers’ expense,” the party said in a statement.
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/ 17 January 2006
The United States believes al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is alive and hiding around the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. ”We have no intelligence or evidence that indicates that he [Bin Laden] is dead or incapacitated, so our working assumption is that he is still alive,” said State Department spokesperson Henry Crumpton.