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/ 10 December 2004
Brazil and Peru have announced a -million plan for a highway to link Brazil’s Amazon basin to the Pacific, raising concerns about further devastation in the rainforest. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Peru’s president, Alejandro Toledo, outlined plans for the 1 137km road linking Amazon river port of Assis in Brazil with Peru’s Pacific ports of Matarini, Ilo and San Juan.
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/ 10 December 2004
France is to launch a French-language news channel next year in a long-awaited attempt to challenge the dominance of the American view of world current affairs, the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said on Thursday. The government will provide â,¬30-million in start-up funding for the channel, which will ”allow international broadcasting that will express the diversity to which our nation is attached,” Raffarin said.
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/ 10 December 2004
With the festive season regarded as heist season, police are bracing themselves for a growing headache: their own members acting as bounty hunters. According to senior police sources, the drive to catch heist kingpins as soon as possible arises from the prospect of robbing the robbers before they have had time to stash their loot. But the state is tightening the screws on the beneficiaries of corruption.
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/ 10 December 2004
The HIV/Aids pandemic is the worst catastrophe in history and is blighting childhood across the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations said on Thursday. Advances in children’s survival, health and education are being reversed by a ”triple whammy” of Aids, conflict and poverty, according to the UN children’s agency, Unicef.
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/ 10 December 2004
Ariel Sharon beat off resistance to his Gaza pull-out plan on Thursday to win the backing of his ruling Likud party to invite the Labour opposition into the government. The prime minister’s victory appears to assure his plans to close Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank next year.
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/ 10 December 2004
A senior CIA analyst who was once decorated for his work on weapons proliferation in the Middle East has accused the spy agency of ruining his career as punishment for his refusal to adhere to official pre-war ”dogma” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
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/ 10 December 2004
Scholars are generally agreed that, in the natural evolutionary process of language, words change their meaning. In a Darwinlike process they adapt to their environments and climates and thus survive. Take ”clinic”, for example, which derives from the Greek klinikos — kline, a bed. Words adapt to their usage, as indeed do their pronunciations. As an example, anyone listening to our television newscasts will have noticed the decomposition of the word ”protest”.
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/ 10 December 2004
The dust had hardly settled on Tuesday this week before the squabbling started.
Had the vote of Gold Fields’s shareholders truly represented the majority view? Did the vote, which rejected the group’s plans to merge its assets outside South Africa with those of Canada’s IAMGold, represent a motion of no confidence in the group’s directors? Was it a proxy vote in favour of the hostile bid by Harmony Gold?
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/ 10 December 2004
The villagers in Egebeleku community have clean water. Shell built the project, powered by solar panels, to improve relations with the local communities they work alongside in the oil-rich but notoriously volatile Niger Delta. However, visitors hear one persistent whisper: "Put me in the Shell work, I need a job; I don’t have any work at all." The pleas of the youths lie at the heart of the problems that haunt Africa’s biggest oil producer.
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/ 10 December 2004
The Department of Trade and Industry is to launch the Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda) next week, replacing small-business promotion agencies Ntsika and the National Manufacturing Advice Centre (Namac). The move represents a policy shift by the department, and Seda will provide non-financial advisory and support services.