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/ 4 February 2005

Polish senators vote on lawmakers in jail

Polish lawmakers will be paid half their salary if they are "jailed temporarily" but won’t receive their daily parliamentary allowance, the Upper House Senate voted on Thursday. Senators voted 63 in favour and six against an amendment that made a distinction between temporary detention and fully-fledged imprisonment

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/ 4 February 2005

Still singing

Pascal Lamche’s documentary Sophiatown should be seen by all who have an interest in South Africa’s relatively recent past — especially those interested in the way politics and culture were necessarily entwined. Shaun de Waal reviews.

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/ 4 February 2005

Mbeki praises outcomes of WEF meeting

President Thabo Mbeki has praised world leaders who were at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last month, for committing to be ”part of the generation that eliminates extreme poverty” in Africa and the world. Mbeki led a South African delegation that attended the meeting at the end of January.

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/ 4 February 2005

A smashing new trend in Thailand

A disgruntled Thai customer on Friday smashed up his allegedly defective Toyota pickup truck with a sledgehammer after failing to get the company to replace the offending vehicle with a deluxe Lexus sports car. Noraset Roonpraphan took a sledgehammer to his two-year-old Toyota Hilux Tiger pickup truck.

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/ 4 February 2005

Two claimed dead in Nigerian oil protest

Nigeria’s army quelled a demonstration at one of the country’s main oil-export terminals on Friday, said the platform’s operator, ChevronTexaco, and activists claimed two protesters were shot dead. Soldiers in the Escravos terminal opened fire on the demonstrators, killing two, said Helen Joe, a militant leader.

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/ 4 February 2005

Passenger jet goes missing in Afghanistan

Afghan and Nato forces launched a ground and air search on Friday for an Afghan passenger jet carrying 104 people after it disappeared from radar screens during a snowstorm near the mountain-ringed capital. The Kam Air Boeing 737-200 took off on Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat, bound for Kabul.

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/ 4 February 2005

Some SA media ‘reluctant to bark’

Portions of South Africa’s media are failing in their role as watchdogs, and seem ”extremely reluctant to bark these days”, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Friday. He singled out the South African Broadcasting Corporation for particular criticism, calling it a ”virtual propaganda arm” of the African National Congress.