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/ 17 February 2005
Revelations that South Africa attempted to stop a Southern African Development Community (SADC) judicial delegation, declaring the mission “unnecessary”, have resulted in confusion about the country’s approach to the upcoming election in Zimbabwe. The legal team was meant to precede and inform a broader SADC observer mission.
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/ 17 February 2005
The manne at the Dorsbult bar were glued to the television this week for the opening of Parliament down in the Visdorp, and they agreed that never before had a celebration of African democracy looked so like a Victorian debutante’s ball. The hats were immense, the tails starched, the soldiers dashing, the carpets red; but no one looked more bonny than Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
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/ 17 February 2005
Oil trading was interrupted for more than an hour on Wednesday in the world’s second largest energy market when 35 Greenpeace activists invaded the International Petroleum Exchange in London on the day the Kyoto global warming treaty came into effect.
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/ 17 February 2005
There is one broad certainty about the highly professional assassination of Rafik Hariri, the billionaire former prime minister who has dominated Lebanese politics since the end of the civil war in 1991. He fell victim to the hapless role this small, politically fragile and religiously divided country is once again playing: the battleground of international conflicts larger than itself.
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/ 17 February 2005
Somewhere there’s an America that’s full of neighbourhoods where black and white kids play softball together, where biracial families e-mail photos online and where Asians and blacks dance in the same nightclub. And that America is on your television. Advertising has created a carefully manufactured racial utopia, a narrative of colourblindness, say some sociologists.
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/ 16 February 2005
Kenyan police on Wednesday fired tear gas to break up a crowd of several hundred protesting market vendors who had blockaded a government building in central Nairobi, witnesses said. At least two dozen police in riot gear launched tear gas into the demonstrators.
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/ 16 February 2005
A powerful blast occurred near Iran’s Gulf port of Daylam on Wednesday, Iranian television reported, as witnesses said they saw a missile being fired from an unidentified plane. Local officials have been dispatched to the site to identify the cause of the blast in an uninhabited area in the south of the country.
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/ 16 February 2005
A British fish-and-chip-shop owner pledged on Wednesday to embark on a 12-hour cooking epic to make the world’s biggest bag of chips. Kelvin Baines aims to make his mark by frying 1 134kg of potatoes at the Chip Stop in Plymouth, south-west England.
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/ 16 February 2005
Protesters gathered outside the United States consulate in Johannesburg on Wednesday, the day the international climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol came into force. The US has not signed the treaty. Demonstrators waved banners saying ”Stop US climate crime” and ”Beat the heat, beat the Bush”.