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/ 2 September 2005
Residual mistrust between Mozambique’s major political parties continues to threaten the country’s hard-won democracy, according to political observers. Although the Frelimo government and the rebel movement, Renamo, signed a peace agreement in 1992 after 16 years of war, neither side has totally let its guard down.
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/ 2 September 2005
Hurricane Katrina pushed oil prices to new records this week as news filtered through to panicking oil traders in London and New York of widespread damage to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico caused by what looks set to be the costliest hurricane since Andrew in 1992.
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/ 2 September 2005
Opinions are divided as to whether Old Mutual seems to have settled for second prize in its bid for Skandia, the distressed Swedish life and funds management group. Old Mutual has been looking to add new legs to its international business and had peered under the skirts of companies such as United Kingdom-based Britannic before eyeing Skandia, which has fallen on hard times.
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/ 2 September 2005
"I am not separated from my husband — we were separated only by the police." Matilda* (59) has spent the past month in a village amid the dry bush of Matabeleland North. She is one of thousands of Zimbabweans to be dumped in the countryside in the past two months.
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/ 2 September 2005
Reading Shaun de Waal’s review of Zulu Love Letter (”Woman on the Verge” ) left me wondering just which Zulu Love Letter he had watched. The review is a superficial dismissal of the film; his narrow critical vision does gross injustice to such a rich and layered film.
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/ 2 September 2005
Malik has the nonchalant manner of any 14-year-old when he says ”I don’t know” or snaps at his little sister, Fatima. But his green eyes are ”those of a 40-year-old man”, his mother says, even a year after he survived the Beslan school hostage massacre. Sitting on a bench outside his family’s home, Malik Kolchakeyev already knows what questions are coming.
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/ 2 September 2005
The Louisiana coastline may have been so badly damaged by the hurricane because man-made engineering of the delta has led to erosion of natural defences, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The engineering of the past 100 years has also disturbed natural barriers which traditionally prevented storm surges and protected against hurricanes, says the society.
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/ 2 September 2005
Chaos spread across New Orleans along with the brown, toxic floodwater in the early hours of Wednesday, and the thousands of stragglers still trapped awoke to find themselves in a city with few laws, little mercy and no clear way out. The police seemed to have all but evaporated in the course of a night of looting and gunfire, in which at least one police officer was badly injured.
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/ 2 September 2005
Microsoft on Wednesday directly challenged Google in the burgeoning internet telephony market by buying Teleo, a firm that allows users to make calls from their computers to normal telephones. Microsoft’s entry into Internet telephony follows the launch earlier this month by Google, the world’s leading search engine, of Google Talk.
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/ 2 September 2005
Claims have emerged of a possible high-level security leak in the National Prosecuting Authority, which throw new light on the Scorpions’s raids on former deputy president Jacob Zuma and his legal advisers. Usually reliable sources claim the Scorpions suspected that sensitive internal information from the Zuma investigation had been leaked to the Zuma camp and part of the reason for the raids was to find evidence of this.