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/ 3 September 2004
The long avenues in West Palm Beach are deserted, stores are closed and shuttered, here and there a man struggles in the damp wind to board up his windows against the impending menace of Hurricane Frances, the worst storm to hit the state of Florida in 10 years. Frances should make landfall in Florida at 8pm local time on Saturday.
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/ 3 September 2004
Up to 30 000 priceless books may have been destroyed by a fire that swept through a historic library in the eastern German city of Weimar, authorities said on Friday. The blaze broke out late on Thursday, destroying part of the roof and the top floor of the 17th-century Anna-Amalia library and spreading through the lower floors.
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/ 3 September 2004
Iraq’s senior Sunni Muslim scholars said on Friday that two French reporters held hostage for two weeks are out of danger and their release is ”a matter of time”. Reporters Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot were kidnapped by a radical Sunni group demanding Paris rescind a ban on Islamic headscarves in state schools.
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/ 3 September 2004
Sudan is ready to discuss the deployment of additional African Union monitors in Darfur in response to calls for an increased international presence in the troubled western region — but is still opposed to the deployment in Darfur of foreign peacekeepers with a broader mandate than AU observers monitoring ceasefire violations.
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/ 3 September 2004
The Boeremag treason trial on Friday stopped unexpectedly when a state witness claimed he has proof that Boeremag leader Tom Vorster was a CIA and military intelligence agent. A defence advocate said the claims might result in the defence demanding a trial-within-a-trial to establish the truth of the claims.
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/ 3 September 2004
South Africa’s official opposition leader, Tony Leon, says that Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats and Pieter Mulder’s Freedom Front Plus are the handmaidens of one-party dominance by the African National Congress and accuses the two opposition parties of existing only through ”cannibalising the opposition”.
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/ 3 September 2004
Two years after Côte d’Ivoire plunged into a low-level civil war following a rebel uprising against President Laurent Gbagbo, the West African state remains bitterly divided, with only one of 10 new laws aimed at reconciling the country passed. Another touchy issue in the country is that of foreigners claiming Ivorian nationality.
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/ 3 September 2004
Though Microsoft’s new security update package is all about protecting systems from worms, viruses and spyware, it can’t do much about what’s already on computers — and that could pose a problem. The company is warning users of the Windows XP operating system to check for spyware before downloading the free massive security update, called Service Pack 2.
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/ 3 September 2004
"So there we were …" Mike van Graan has breakfast with the minister of arts and culture, and gets to chew the fat on topics ranging from free-trade agreements and their potentially adverse impact on culture, and the lack of skilled human resources to sustain cultural transformation.
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/ 3 September 2004
Hollywood has reached a new low with <i>Man on Fire</i>, a film that says it’s all right to torture people, writes Alex Cox. It is perhaps ironic that the film, with its American-torturer-hero, appeared in the US just before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.