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/ 3 September 2004
Southern African meteorologists say regional residents can expect another year of mostly normal rainfall, but with drought-stricken areas repeating dry patterns that have persisted for years and Indian Ocean nations subject to more cyclones. The prognosticators are quite aware that weather has become a matter of political consequence.
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/ 3 September 2004
Film-industry worker Ronald Charles Grimsley, on trial for the murder of an 18-year-old woman, told the Johannesburg High Court on Friday he is not a violent person. Grimsley, from Fontainebleau, has admitted to having come around after a blackout to find his hands around the throat of Flowerday, who was not breathing.
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/ 3 September 2004
Police were mopping up streets in Intabazwe at Harrismith on Friday after three days of rioting that claimed the life of a teenager. Municipal workers helped to clear away burnt tyres, car wrecks and rocks left behind by demonstrators. The protests were sparked by what was termed poor service delivery.
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/ 3 September 2004
Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon on Friday requested Parliament’s ethics committee to probe allegations that senior MPs failed to make proper disclosure in the register of members’ interests. The Mail & Guardian reported on Friday that 13 MPs had failed to disclose fully or had wrongfully disclosed their assets.
MP’s midnight gag attempt
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/ 3 September 2004
Libya signed a deal in Tripoli on Friday to pay -million in compensation to mainly German victims of a Berlin nightclub bombing 18 years ago, an AFP correspondent said. The 1986 bombing at the La Belle discotheque in then West Berlin killed two American GIs and a Turkish woman and wounded more than 250 people.
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/ 3 September 2004
An Indian man has tried to enter the Guinness Book of World Records by feeding a live grass snake into his right nostril and taking it out through his mouth, media reports said on Friday. Last November, the man swallowed 200 earthworms, each measuring at least 10cm, in 30 seconds.
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/ 3 September 2004
Ambulance sirens screamed and naked, bleeding children wailed in the arms of soldiers amid earth-shattering grenade blasts as the three-day school hostage crisis in Beslan ended in a chaotic bloodbath. "They did not give us water," said one young boy. Another naked boy at a different spot later said: "We drank urine."
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/ 3 September 2004
Complaints by feminist groups have forced Bangkok authorities to replace signs that called on women but not men to remain chaste on city buses where Thai youths are known to have sex, an official said on Friday. The Bangkok Mass Transit Authority on Friday began posting improved versions of the signs.
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/ 3 September 2004
The trade union Solidarity on Friday said it finds it regrettable that oil and chemicals group Sasol has not invited organised labour to join in the internal inquiry into the recent explosion at its Secunda ethylene plant. The death toll from the blast on Wednesday at Sasol Secunda ethylene plant remains at six.
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/ 3 September 2004
Austrian historians are ridiculing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican National Convention that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and left a ”socialist” country when he moved away in 1968. ”I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes,” Schwarzenegger said.