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/ 3 December 2004
It is often said of an unexpected football result that the underdogs had not read the script. After the Uefa Cup tie between Panionios and Dinamo Tbilisi in Greece on Tuesday night, however, many bookmakers suspect that the underdogs had not merely read the script, but had helped to write it too.
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/ 3 December 2004
Iraq’s Shia parties have built a powerful political alliance uniting moderates with extremists and seem likely to dominate next month’s general election. The coalition, formed in weeks of private negotiations, will put forward a joint list of candidates. The process has been overseen by Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
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/ 3 December 2004
On a roundabout in the centre of Ramallah, the Palestinians’ political capital, young men hang out around a steel structure guarded by plastic lions. Aged between 18 and 30 and dressed in leather jackets and jeans, they should be the kind of voters that the jailed Palestinian militant, Marwan Barghouti, can rely on in next month’s election.
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/ 2 December 2004
A ”serious incident” has occurred between soldiers from the Sudanese army and members of a commission, led by Chad, monitoring a ceasefire in Sudan’s Darfur region, corroborating sources said on Thursday. According to the rebels’ military spokesperson, the ceasefire commission team was attacked by troops from the Sudanese armed forces.
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/ 2 December 2004
The Food and Allied Workers Union (Fawu), which has slammed a R502-million deal between an agricultural company and a black economic empowerment (BEE) consortium, on Thursday warned it would take industrial action if its concerns were not addressed. The deal was between agricultural services group Afgri and the consortium Agri Sizwe.
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/ 2 December 2004
Britain will give priority to tackling global poverty, climate change and the Aids epidemic when it assumes the presidency of the Group of Eight nations in the second half of 2005, the government said on Thursday. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown told parliament that Britain would ”make its G8 presidency count to meet the needs of the developing world.”
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/ 2 December 2004
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe called for unity at a crucial ruling party congress on Thursday amid tensions within the governing Zanu-PF about the election of a new vice-president. ”The message of unity… has continued to energise us even as our external and internal enemies have been vigorously seeking their dream of regime change,” Mugabe said.
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/ 2 December 2004
The vice-president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Azarias Ruberwa, has called on Rwanda to withdraw troops from his country , after United Nations officials reported possible movements of Rwandan troops crossing the border. Ruberwa, who led a Rwandan-backed rebel group before joining the DRC’s postwar transitional government in September, said his country had taken its case to the United Nations Security Council.
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/ 2 December 2004
A project to clear landmines along paths used by elephants in a wildlife sanctuary in Angola was launched at a conference on landmines in Nairobi on Thursday. If the mines are cleared, an estimated 120 000 elephants in Botswana, whose numbers are growing at 5% annually, would be able to move north to Angola and Zambia during migratory periods.