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/ 21 October 2005
Rory Carroll, the Guardian journalist kidnapped in Baghdad on Wednesday, was freed on Thursday night after 36 hours in captivity in a dark underground cell. Carroll phoned the newspaper to confirm that his captors, whom he described as Shia opportunists, had released him into the hands of the Iraqi government.
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/ 21 October 2005
Avenging lynch mobs have seized and burnt alive more than 20 suspected kidnappers over the past month in and around the Nigerian city of Lagos where terrified residents have taken extreme measures to stamp out ritual child sacrifices, police and witnesses said.
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/ 21 October 2005
Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils has moved to suspend National Intelligence Agency boss Billy Masetlha and two of his most senior managers, as the bitter succession battle in the African National Congress reaches into the highest levels of the country’s security apparatus. Masetlha, head of operations Gibson Njenje and counter-intelligence chief Bob Mhlanga received letters from Kasrils on Monday asking them to give reasons why they should not be fired.
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/ 21 October 2005
Thursday was No Car Day in Jo’burg, an initiative by the Metro Council that was greeted with incredulity by the car-owning classes.Writing this on Tuesday, I don’t know whether I’ll use public transport on Thursday. I’ll walk to work, as always — and if I have to go to my Richmond office or to Braamfontein or the city, I’ll jump on a minibus taxi, writes Justn Pearce.
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/ 21 October 2005
How scary is bird flu? Is it, as Mike Davis, the author of <i>The Monster at Our Door</i>, puts it, a "viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity"? Or are the "it’s not if, but when" predictions overblown? Recently, the chief medical officer for England and Wales, Sir Liam Donaldson, said the strain of bird flu might not hit Britain this winter, but it would arrive some time soon.
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/ 21 October 2005
Chun In-Hyo was just eight years old when North Korea’s peerless leader Kim Jong-Il declared the 21st century the era of the information technology revolution. Now aged 12, Chun is at the tip of the spear in the Stalinist state’s charge down the information superhighway.
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/ 21 October 2005
A number of African National Congress leaders in KwaZulu-Natal have warned that they will not support Premier S’bu Ndebele’s re-election at the 2007 provincial conference unless he shows decisive leadership over the Jacob Zuma saga. The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> spoke to leaders from eight of the 11 ANC regions in the province.
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/ 21 October 2005
Johannesburg attorney Barry Aaron, it might be said, is the perfect gentleman. He doesn’t kill journalists. Reporters without Borders records that, worldwide, 51 journalists have been slain in the course of their duties this year. If another three are dead by December 31, it will be the bloodiest year in a decade.
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/ 21 October 2005
Those who watch <i>Top Billing</i> are not, as a rule, exposed to disturbing concepts like multi-lingualism. Indeed, generations of selective breeding and some ferociously opportunist and cheekily genocidal shenanigans by Great Granddaddy on the Reef in the 1880s have combined to form a protective cocoon around them, keeping at bay the horror of the middle-class world.
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/ 21 October 2005
In the week South African cyberspace was given an area code (O87), the country’s first report on wireless broadband offerings was released and the cheapest asymmetric digital subscriber line connection was announced. The suffix 087 was allocated for Voice over Internet Protocol numbers by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa.