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/ 7 December 2004
Nigerian villagers lifted their blockade of three oil pumping stations in the volatile Niger Delta on Tuesday after energy giants Shell and ChevronTexaco agreed to discuss funding local development projects. The three plants had been occupied since Sunday morning by protesters from the ethnic Ijaw fishing community of Kula.
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/ 7 December 2004
Russian soldiers in World War II-style uniforms slogged through early winter slush on Tuesday to re-enact the Soviet Union’s defeat of Adolf Hitler’s armies in the Battle of Moscow near the Russian capital 63 years ago. President Vladimir Putin joined elderly survivors of the World War II battle to watch the 90-minute commemoration.
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/ 7 December 2004
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The Durban High Court refused on Tuesday a state application for a South African Revenue Service (Sars) official to testify in the Schabir Shaik fraud and corruption trial. Rob Reid, who has already supplied the state with an affidavit, will no longer go into the witness box.
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/ 7 December 2004
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has approved Telkom’s tariff and fee structures for next year, the authority said on Tuesday. Icasa said in a statement that Telkom is required to reduce its average price for services by 1,5%, for its prices to fall below the inflation rate.
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/ 7 December 2004
The men who hoaxed the BBC into believing Union Carbide’s parent company had apologised for the Bhopal disaster are the same people who gave talking Barbie dolls a man’s voice 11 years ago. In 1993 pranksters outraged toymaker Mattel by swapping the voice boxes of Barbie and GI Joe action figures and putting them back on shop shelves in a spot of gender-bending activism.
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/ 7 December 2004
It was last seen 42 years ago and was believed to be extinct. But the Bavarian short-eared mouse — a unique species of rodent that lives in a remote part of the Alps – has made a surprise comeback. A German zoologist last spotted the extremely rare mouse in 1962, after discovering the species in Bavaria.
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/ 7 December 2004
Hamid Karzai was sworn in on Tuesday as Afghanistan’s first popularly elected president, promising to help the impoverished country leave behind its brutal past, shore up its young democracy and confront the challenges of terrorism and the drugs trade.
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/ 7 December 2004
The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, said on Monday night that the United States ”war on terror” had failed to address core problems, and that the world was in consequence a far less safe place. General Musharraf, who took power in a coup in 1999, sees himself as close to the centre of the ”war on terror” because he has Afghanistan on his border.
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/ 7 December 2004
Visitors to a French museum will on Monday be confronted with an unusually arresting image not witnessed for more than 120 years: that of the most iconic of American monuments towering over the central Paris skyline. A new exhibition at the the Musée des Arts et Métiers in central Paris retells the story of Liberty Enlightening the World, better known as the Statue of Liberty.
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/ 7 December 2004
A South African accused of being part of a plot to overthrow the Equatorial Guinea government earlier this year said on Tuesday he was relieved to be back home. ”South Africa is a fantastic country which you don’t realise how good it is till you leave it,” Mark Schmidt told the National Press Club in Pretoria. He was found not guilty and released on November 27 ”after months of hell” in detention in the West African country.