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/ 3 December 2004
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Thursday ruled out any regime change in his country and taunted British Prime Minister Tony Blair as he opened his ruling Zanu-PF party congress which is due to renew the party’s top leadership. ”Regime change Mr Blair, who are you to talk of regime change in Zimbabwe?,” said Mugabe.
Mugabe calls for unity
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/ 3 December 2004
Sydney’s Lord Mayor has angered citizens of Australia’s largest city and Prime Minister John Howard by decorating the town hall with a single tree in a modest festive show seen as an effort to avoid offending non-Christian immigrants. The symbol of Sydney’s Christmas is a lonely tree on the town hall balcony.
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/ 3 December 2004
Renewed hostilities between the African National Congress and its left-wing allies are likely to fuel growing demands within the South African Communist Party for the party to stand independently in elections. Support for the go-it-alone strategy grew at SACP provincial congresses this year, where it received majority support in six of its nine provinces.
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/ 3 December 2004
The profiling of donors by the South African National Blood Service (SANBS) smacked of racism, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Thursday. She was referring to an admission by the SANBS that it racially profiled blood donations and that the Health Department was aware of this. Tshabalala-Msimang said she should have been consulted.
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/ 3 December 2004
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, threw his weight behind holding totally new elections in Ukraine on Thursday, rejecting the idea favoured by the European Union of a quick repeat of the fraud-ridden runoff vote that has pitched the country into crisis.
Signs of compromise in Ukraine
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/ 3 December 2004
The Bush administration is funding sexual health projects that teach children that HIV can be contracted through sweat and tears, touching genitals can result in pregnancy, and that a 43-day-old foetus is a thinking person. A congressional analysis of more than a dozen federally funded ”abstinence-only programmes” unveiled a litany of ”false, misleading and distorted information”.
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/ 3 December 2004
The conversation had turned towards the literary potential of the Garden Route, but despite the Major’s staccato insistences that he had once skimmed a slim volume about a resourceful prostitute with a wooden leg living in Knysna, it was agreed that nothing readable had ever been set in the bosky territory that lay beyond the polo field.
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/ 3 December 2004
Salitun Lu in the Chaoyang district is known as Beijing’s "Bar Street". With more than 200 bars to choose from, how do you decide where to go and sip on Tsingtao beer? One suggestion is to flip a coin. Heads means three bars to the right, tails means every third bar to the left. <i>Escape</i> gets a taste of the bar culture that has taken hold of the Chinese capital.
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/ 3 December 2004
The increasingly desperate struggle sparked by Harmony’s hostile bid climaxes in a shareholders meeting this week. Gold Fields’s shareholders will vote on the proposal that their company should merge its mining interests outside South Africa with those of Canadian miner IAMGold. The merger would result in a new company, to be called Gold Fields International, owned 30% by IAMGold’s present shareholders and 70% by Gold Fields’s.
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/ 3 December 2004
Ghana’s President John Kufuor of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) is on course to win a second term. The country’s opposition candidate, John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is struggling to emerge from the shadow of former NDC leader Jerry Rawlings ahead of elections on December 7. Rawlings’s high profile is making Atta Mills look weak, reducing his support among undecided voters.