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/ 17 January 2005
Spaniard Carlos Moya became the highest-profile first-round casualty at the Australian Open in Melbourne on Monday after being bundled out by unheralded compatriot Guillermo Garcia-Lopez. Fifth-seeded Moya never got going against his rising Davis Cup hitting partner Garcia-Lopez, ranked 106th in the world.
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/ 17 January 2005
Good batting on Monday morning could still see England win the fourth Castle Lager/MTN cricket Test match against South Africa. That is the views of England’s opening bat Marcus Trescothick, who scored an undefeated 101 when bad light stopped play at the Wanderers on Sunday afternoon.
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/ 17 January 2005
The South African Reserve Bank on Monday launched banknotes with improved security features which will go into circulation from February 1. The new banknotes will retain the "big five" animal motif on the front and the economic sector themes on the back. There will, however, be some design changes.
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/ 17 January 2005
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexis II, assured his flock on Friday that new identification documents to be introduced in Russia will not contain the "sign of the Antichrist" despite scare-mongering rumors to the contrary, Itar-Tass reported. The patriarch was speaking ahead of a meeting of clerics in Moscow.
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/ 17 January 2005
Tired of hearing reports of visitors paying grossly inflated prices for taxi rides in his city, the mayor of Prague disguised himself as an Italian visitor — and promptly unmasked a driver whose meter ran at more than six times the normal rate, a newspaper said on Friday.
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/ 17 January 2005
Mark Thatcher has provided evidence to South African authorities about the involvement of others in the failed coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, officials said on Sunday. ”Mark Thatcher has spoken to our investigating officer about other people who were involved in the coup plot and he is continuing to speak to us,” said Sipho Ngwema, a spokesperson for South Africa’s special prosecution unit, the Scorpions.
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/ 17 January 2005
Weeks before Nazi troops abandoned Rome, Adolf Hitler personally ordered the SS to kidnap the pope so he could be brought back to Germany and locked up in a castle, according to previously unpublished testimony made available at the weekend. The newspaper Avvenire, which is owned by the Catholic church in Italy, suggested the kidnap plot was part of a wider plan to ”abolish” Christianity.
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/ 17 January 2005
A grieving Nelson Mandela threw his weight behind Gordon Brown’s ”Marshall plan” for tackling poverty and debt in Africa on Sunday, saying he would travel to London in February to lobby a meeting of the G7 finance ministers. Mandela formally retired from public life last summer, but held a press conference last week to reveal that his son had died of HIV/Aids.
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/ 17 January 2005
A 66-year-old Romanian woman is believed to have become the world’s oldest mother on Sunday, after giving birth to a girl. Doctors at the Giulesti Maternity hospital in Bucharest said Adriana Iliescu’s daughter, Eliza Maria, was delivered by caesarean section more than six weeks before the end of a normal, 40-week pregnancy. The child’s twin sister was stillborn.
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/ 17 January 2005
Rahmatun is almost inaudible over the drone of the low-flying aid helicopter. Pointing upwards, the softly spoken 14-year-old eventually makes herself understood. ”That’s what I want to do when I grow up,” she says. ”I want to be a pilot. It would be a great way to see the world.”