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/ 23 September 2005
Sri Lanka has announced measures to prevent voters impersonating the tsunami dead as well as special arrangements for those displaced by the calamity to vote in November’s presidential elections. Elections’ Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake said polling cards would be sent out to those believed to have perished in the tsunami but these will be marked to indicate the voter is dead.
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/ 23 September 2005
It sounds like a great idea: Let’s just blast hurricanes like Rita and Katrina out of the sky before they hurt more people. Or, at least weaken the storms and steer them away from cities. Atmospheric scientists say it’s wishful thinking that we could destroy or even influence something as huge and powerful as a hurricane.
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/ 23 September 2005
Tens of thousands were on the highways fleeing Hurricane Rita, but at Kilkeanny’s Irish Bar in downtown Houston the party was still on. As the powerful storm churned toward the Gulf Coast, the Texas oil metropolis and fourth-largest United States city was eerily deserted except for very few places like Kilkeanny’s, where the bar was packed with beer drinkers and the loudspeakers blared electric blues.
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/ 23 September 2005
Insurer Old Mutual on Friday announced that it will proceed with its offer for Swedish group Skandia. Old Mutual said that in a consolidating financial-services market, the industrial logic of combining the two groups is compelling, providing prospects of enhanced growth with reduced risk for all shareholders.
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/ 23 September 2005
The government has quietly agreed to end a ”dispensation” in which fuel giant Sasol was to repay subsidies — worth R6-billion since 1989 — paid to the fuel-from-coal giant when oil prices were low. The result is that while Sasol received billions of rands of direct support while oil prices were low, it is not required to repay these funds now that oil prices are stratospheric.
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/ 23 September 2005
It was gripping television. A commercial jetliner unable to retract its front landing gear circled for three hours south of Los Angeles, burning fuel, before it attempted an emergency landing. As the pictures were carried live on TV, aviation experts pondered the likely fate of the 145 people on board.
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/ 23 September 2005
New Zealand sailors suffered genetic damage from their exposure to radiation during nuclear tests held in the Pacific in the 1950s, a scientist leading a new research study said on Friday. A total of 551 New Zealand Navy sailors witnessed nine nuclear tests in 1957 and 1958 at close quarters, wearing only white cotton hoods and dark glasses to protect themselves from the blasts.
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/ 23 September 2005
The post-election power struggle between Germany’s political parties became bitter on Thursday, with Angela Merkel’s conservatives accusing the Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, of trying to stage a ”putsch”. Merkel’s Christian Democrats reacted furiously after senior members of Schröder’s Social Democrats called for a change in the way in which the seats held by political parties are counted.
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/ 23 September 2005
A portrait long considered to be by one of Rembrandt’s students, has been unveiled in Amsterdam as a work by the old master himself. Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet went on display at the Rembrandt House museum on Thursday after three years of painstaking restoration — including the removal of a fur collar probably added in the 18th century.
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/ 23 September 2005
United States boxer Leavander Johnson died on Thursday from injuries sustained five days earlier in a lightweight title fight with Jesus Chavez. The 35-year-old died at University Medical Centre, where he had been hospitalised since being injured in the fight on Saturday at the MGM Grand hotel-casino.