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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.
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/ 13 October 2005
Highly organised, well-armed and increasingly brazen pirates have turned the unpatrolled waters off the Somali coast into a maritime disaster zone and attack and seize merchant vessels seemingly at will. Amid faltering efforts to restore a functioning government to the mainland, Somalia’s Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden sea lanes have been taken over by ransom-seeking warlords, officials say.
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/ 13 October 2005
A Cameroonian delegation, representing three government ministries, will arrive in South Africa on Saturday to take home four of their gorillas residing at the Pretoria Zoo. Week-long talks are scheduled to secure their repatriation. The four young Western Lowland gorillas were illegally captured in Cameroon in 2002 and sent to the Taiping Zoo in Malaysia with forged documentation.
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/ 13 October 2005
Zimbabwe’s stocks of locally produced anti-retrovirals are running low, the state daily said on Thursday. The Herald said that stocks of the locally manufactured life-prolonging drugs have dwindled due to shortages of foreign exchange needed to import raw materials.
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/ 13 October 2005
A 73-year-old Italian man was back on his feet on Thursday, two days after spending 35 minutes in the afterlife, reports said. According to Rome-based daily La Repubblica, the pensioner suffered a heart attack while being treated for unrelated problems in a hospital in Montova on Tuesday morning.
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/ 13 October 2005
About 220 Malians migrants marooned in Morocco after failing to reach Europe will be flown home on Thursday at their own request, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said on Thursday. The repatriation of the group of Malians, in and around the Moroccan city of Oujda, will be strictly voluntary, Jemini Pandya, a spokesperson for the Geneva-based IOM, said.
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/ 13 October 2005
October 13 is being declared Peel Day to celebrate the life and legacy of trail-blazing BBC disc jockey John Peel, who died suddenly last year at the age of 65, the public broadcaster announced. Gigs will take place across Britain in as many venues as possible, and organisers hope Peel Day will become an annual event.
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/ 13 October 2005
Leading British playwright Harold Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced. Pinter, ”who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”, is the foremost representative of drama in post-war Britain, the jury said.
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/ 13 October 2005
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club have formally abandoned their ban on women competing in the Open Championship. Their decision came on the day teenage sensation Michelle Wie made her professional debut. Next year’s entry form will no longer restrict the event to ”any male professional golfer” or ”male amateur golfer whose playing handicap does not exceed scratch”.