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/ 26 September 2005
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy lawmakers on Monday sought more talks with Beijing on political reform in the city after a historic first meeting with a senior Communist Party official ended in acrimony. They said tense opening talks with Zhang Dejiang, party chief of the southern economic powerhouse province of Guangdong, should be just the beginning and they should be allowed to continue pressing their case.
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/ 26 September 2005
The leader of an United States movement challenging conventional science on HIV/Aids is being investigated for child endangerment after her three-year-old daughter died of the disease. Christine Maggiore, the child’s HIV-positive mother, denies HIV leads to Aids and refused to take anti-retroviral drugs during pregnancy.
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/ 26 September 2005
Indian drug firm Kadila Pharmaceutical is building a factory in a suburb of the Ethiopian capital at a cost of 75-million birr (,65-million) that is expected to be operational early next year, its Vice President Ajai Agrawal disclosed on Monday. The factory, under construction at Akaki, 20km south-east of Addis Ababa, is expected to produce drugs mainly for tuberculosis and malaria.
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/ 26 September 2005
Finance ministers from the world’s richest nations expressed their concern over sky-high oil prices during a weekend meeting in Washington, DC, and warned that fuel costs could derail global economic growth. Also, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank agreed in principle to wipe out -billion in debt owed by the planet’s poorest countries.
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/ 26 September 2005
Namibia’s land reform programme is flawed because poor and landless people are not being empowered to become successful farmers once they have been resettled, claims a new report. The Legal Assistance Centre, a local NGO, stressed that land reform involved more than just ”buying or expropriating land from one group in order to give more land to another group”.
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/ 26 September 2005
Rescue helicopters and boats waited for dawn on Monday to resume their search for victims of Hurricane Rita in flooded Louisiana communities as the bill from the natural disaster mounted, although the death toll remained low. Many people were still missing in small towns along the west Louisiana coast that bore the brunt of the storm.
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/ 26 September 2005
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a conservative and a stalwart anti-communist, was poised to become Poland’s Prime Minister on Sunday night, leading a right-wing coalition. Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party came from behind in a general election to take first place with about 28% of the vote, according to Polish television exit polls.
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/ 26 September 2005
The United States military told an al-Jazeera cameraman being held at Guantánamo Bay that he would be released as long as he agreed to spy on journalists at the Arabic news channel, according to documents seen by The Guardian. The journalist has been in the prison without charge for three-and-a-half years after being accused by the US of being a terrorist, allegations he denies.
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/ 26 September 2005
Africa’s last absolute monarch, Swaziland’s King Mswati III, has picked his 13th wife, a palace spokesperson said on Sunday. Seventeen-year-old Phindile Nkambule, who finished her final exams in June to allow her to join the royal house, was unveiled as his next wife-to-be at a traditional reed dance ceremony at the weekend.
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/ 26 September 2005
Firefighters were put on standby in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape on Monday after fears that blazes in four other provinces could spread, a public-private firefighting organisation said. Working on Fire spokesperson Val Charlton said fires are raging in Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and Mpumalanga.