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/ 7 September 2005
British-based aid agency Oxfam criticised rich countries on Thursday for failing to heed warnings of a Niger-like food crisis that could affect 10-million people in Southern Africa. ”Niger was forecast six months in advance, yet rich countries did almost nothing until the eleventh hour,” said Oxfam’s regional coordinator for Southern Africa.
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/ 7 September 2005
Police corruption can be nipped in the bud if the public stop offering officers bribes, the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) said on Wednesday, responding to a television exposé of police taking bribes to release illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, the television footage is, on its own, ”insufficient” to secure the officers’ prosecution, Gauteng police Commissioner Perumal Naidoo said.
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/ 7 September 2005
Mittal Steel has welcomed an interdict issued by the Labour Court in Johannesburg preventing members of trade union Solidarity from striking. The dispute between Mittal Steel South Africa and Solidarity is over the union’s demand for more money for the working hours of 134 of its day-shift members.
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/ 7 September 2005
No one is quite sure when it happened. One day there was no Google. The next day there was, and everyone was using it. Somewhere between September 1998 and December of the same year, it crept into our consciousness and went from being a garage-based start-up to one of PC Magazine‘s top 100 websites of the year.
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/ 7 September 2005
It seems that even if police officers are shown on national television accepting bribes, they can keep their jobs. After the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Special Assignment showed officers accepting bribes from alleged illegal immigrants, the seven officers in question were still on the beat on Wednesday.
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/ 7 September 2005
Confused Egyptian voters and officials tried on Wednesday to adjust to indelible ink, independent monitors, party delegates and multichoice ballots in the country’s first contested presidential poll. Activists from the ruling National Democratic Party were still actively campaigning on Wednesday.
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/ 7 September 2005
The chairperson of the watchdog standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), Francois Beukman, has resigned, he announced on Wednesday. Beukman formally joined the African National Congress at the start of the defection period for National Assembly members.
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/ 7 September 2005
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin took the place of the hospitalised Jacques Chirac in the chair at the government’s weekly Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, confirming his strengthening position as the 72-year-old president’s heir apparent. Detail of the president’s condition remained obscure.
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/ 7 September 2005
Turkmenistan’s President-for-life, Saparmurat Niyazov, has ordered a zoo be built for 300 species of birds and animals, including penguins, in the Central Asian republic’s Kara Kum desert, state television announced on Tuesday. A year ago, Niyazov announced construction of an ice palace capable of holding 1 000 people.
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/ 7 September 2005
A senior official of Italy’s national rail operator was summoned to the transport ministry on Tuesday after several incidents in which passengers complained of being infected or bitten by ticks, fleas and lice on trains, some of them serving Paris.