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/ 13 January 2005
Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi has been summoned to answer questions by the country’s hard-line judiciary or else risk being arrested, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said on Thursday. ”I have received a summons to a revolutionary court,” the human rights activist and lawyer said.
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/ 13 January 2005
An errant husband who agreed to give his wife (R72) for every hour he stayed out past midnight has been ordered by a court to pay her hundreds of dollars, a news report said on Thursday. The couple in Chongqing, central China, struck the agreement to give her peace of mind after she caught him cheating.
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/ 13 January 2005
Zimbabwe’s Information Minister Jonathan Moyo has ”now been officially barred” from contesting the March legislative elections as a candidate of the ruling party. State media said that Moyo ”will not stand on a Zanu-PF ticket in the forthcoming parliamentary elections after the seat was reserved for women candidates to punish those who took part” in an unsanctioned secret succession meeting last year.
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/ 13 January 2005
This hasn’t been a good year for technology. Well, not for me, anyway. And that doesn’t augur well — we still have 50 weeks to go. Among other mishaps, since I sat down to write this column, my laptop has hung and my ADSL connection keeps coming and going. But the biggest catastrophe of the year has been my hard drive being whacked, becoming a rather expensive, 80GB paperweight. But help is on hand in the online chat rooms …
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/ 13 January 2005
South African President Thabo Mbeki left the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) late on Wednesday after eight hours of high-level talks on the post-war transition process in the vast Central African country. On arrival earlier on Wednesday, Mbeki went straight into talks with President Joseph Kabila.
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/ 13 January 2005
Ernie Els has played before the largest galleries this week at the Sony Open, in part because he is trying to become the first player in its 40-year history to win three straight times — and because the Big Easy has been hanging around the Big Wiesy. In the first full-field event, 15-year-old Michelle Wie remains the star attraction.
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/ 13 January 2005
The High Court in Zimbabwe has slashed by three years the jail term imposed by a lower court on the alleged mastermind behind a plot to stage a coup in oil rich Equatorial Guinea, his lawyer said on Thursday. Briton Simon Mann was sentenced to seven years in prison by a magistrate after he was convicted of trying to illegally buy weapons that prosecutors argued were to be used to topple long-time President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in Malabo.
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/ 13 January 2005
Until the tsunami arrived Mr Saiful was the caretaker of Banda Aceh’s junior high school three. He was responsible for tidying up. But on Wednesday he found himself giving a class in religious education. ”I’m teaching the students about 7th-century Islam,” he said. But did he know anything about it? ”Oh yes. I used to be a student myself.”
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/ 13 January 2005
The share price of South African clothing retailer Edcon rose by 2% or R5,50 in early trade on Thursday after the group reiterated that it expects its headline earnings per share for the year to the end of March 2005 to be 60% higher than those of the previous year. Edcon also reported a 24% rise in sales and a 26% rise in gross profit for the 13 weeks to January 1.
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/ 13 January 2005
South Africa’s Competition Tribunal on Wednesday unconditionally approved the merger between Vodacom Service Provider Company (VSP) and Tiscali. Italian group Tiscali is disposing of its interest in South Africa. The Vodacom Group — via its wholly-owned subsidiary VSP — will be acquiring Tiscali’s cellular telephony business.