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/ 13 October 2005
The SA Reserve Bank kept interest rates unchanged on Thursday, but warned of risks posed by rising inflation. ”The deterioration in the inflation outlook cannot be ignored,” the central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee said in a statement. ”The increased risk of possible pass-through leading to pronounced second-round effects on CPIX inflation must inform policy going forward.”
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/ 13 October 2005
Botswana’s Foreign Minister Mompati Merafhe on Thursday denied claims by Britain’s Survival International that it had launched an "ethnic cleansing" of San Bushmen from their ancestral land in the Kalahari. "Nothing could be further from the truth than those malicious allegations being marketed around by a one-issue organisation called Survival International," he said in Pretoria.
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/ 13 October 2005
The Nobel Prize for Literature is considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire, but there is a long list of justly-deserving authors who have died without winning the award. Everyone has their own favourite who never made it on to the laureates list, but there are a good many about whom no-one with an interest in fiction would disagree.
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/ 13 October 2005
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Thursday said it was investigating the source of Zimbabwe’s surprise -million loan payback in September. ”The executive board of the IMF has asked the staff to verify the sources of these funds. We are in the process of doing that,” said Michael Nowak, the deputy director of the IMF’s African department.
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/ 13 October 2005
Indian cricket selectors on Thursday appointed Rahul Dravid as captain for the coming limited-over series against Sri Lanka and South Africa. The selectors did not want to take a chance with longtime skipper Sourav Ganguly following his elbow injury that forced him to skip a domestic one-day trial match this week.
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/ 13 October 2005
Elderly Japanese are fitter and more agile than they were 20 years ago but their grandchildren are flabbier and weaker, according to a nationwide survey. An education ministry survey of 73 000 people aged between six and 79 showed that fitness levels among the middle-aged and elderly had improved markedly since the first survey in 1985.
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/ 13 October 2005
The war on poverty cannot be won unless much greater efforts are made to give women equality, says the annual UN Population Fund report, published on Wednesday. The report calls for government action to free women from the poverty and ignorance often forced upon them by cultural confines in many countries, which has an economic as well as a social toll.
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/ 13 October 2005
France’s interior minister and would-be president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his new partner, a political journalist on the conservative daily Le Figaro, said on Wednesday they planned to sue French news media who had revealed the woman’s identity.
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/ 13 October 2005
Tamil Tiger rebels on Thursday asked peace broker Norway to help end the deadlock in Sri Lanka’s peace process amid a renewed outbreak of internecine clashes. Norway’s special peace envoy Trond Furuhovde met with the political wing leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, SP Thamilselvan, in a bid to lift the impasse in the troubled peace process.
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/ 13 October 2005
Sex-crimes accused Dirk Prinsloo claimed on Thursday that his former girlfriend Cezanne Visser had ulterior motives in seeking to implicate him in indecent acts with two children. ”There is an attempt by [Visser] to drag [Prinsloo] under the water,” his advocate Philip Loubser told the Pretoria High Court.