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/ 3 April 2005

Who will be the next pope?

A multitude of names, spanning the entire religious and political spectrum, are now being touted as the next pope. But predicting who will become the spiritual head of the Catholic Church is a notoriously difficult exercise. History shows that the church has a tendency to overlook the favourite candidates.

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/ 3 April 2005

World mourns the pope

”A few moments before he died, the pope raised his right hand, moving it in an obvious, if only faint, gesture of blessing, as if he were aware of the crowd … in the square who were following the saying of the rosary. As soon as the prayer was over, the pope made a very great effort and said the word ‘Amen’. A moment later, he was dead.”

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/ 3 April 2005

Pope: Messages from around the world

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, United States President George Bush, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, French President Jacques Chirac and many others all paid tribute to Pope John Paul II after the pope’s death on Saturday.

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/ 2 April 2005

Tottenham’s Arnesen happy to learn

Frank Arnesen’s office is neatly arranged. Shelves lining the room display dozens of football reference books and scouting videos. A map of Great Britain is marked with little red flags denoting the location of each Premiership club. The Dane charged with restoring greatness to Tottenham has meticulousness in his method.

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/ 2 April 2005

How a new pope is chosen

On the death of a pope, his successor is elected by a college of cardinals meeting in conclave in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The system of election has been changed several times over the 2 000 years of the papacy’s existence, with Pope John Paul II having himself introduced a new set of rules in 1996.

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/ 2 April 2005

The papacy throughout history

Since the foundation of the Christian religion nearly 2 000 years ago, about 264 popes have presided over the church’s fortunes, from Simon Peter of Galilee to the former Karol Wojtyla of Poland, better known as Pope John Paul II, who died on Saturday evening.

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/ 2 April 2005

How pope revolutionised papacy

John Paul II revolutionised the papacy with his formidable energy and intellectual abilities but his most lasting memorial was to be achieved in the field of politics: the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The pope, who died on Saturday aged 84, gave the papacy a higher profile than it had ever had before.

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/ 2 April 2005

The pope is dead

Pope John Paul II, spiritual leader of the world’s 1,1-billion Roman Catholics, died on Saturday at 9.37pm, the Vatican announced. The 84-year-old pontiff died two days after suffering heart failure brought on by two months of acute breathing problems and other infections. Tens of thousands packed St Peter’s Square on Saturday.

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/ 2 April 2005

Cosatu wants probe of election fraud claims

The Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) has called for investigations into allegations of fraud during Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections. The union body — which staged a demonstration of solidarity with Zimbabwean workers — said it believed the elections took place in ”a flawed political and legal context”.