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/ 7 February 2004
Doctors protesting in Cape Town on Friday against what they called the declining state of public health care were angered when they were prevented from marching to Parliament, as originally planned. The march was held to protest against, among other things, draft legislation that will prevent them from dispensing medication.
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/ 7 February 2004
The big worry in the bird-flu scare is that the virus, at present a low-scale killer, could mutate into a pathogen that could claim millions of lives. A mutated bird-flu virus erupted among humans in 1918, killing as many as 40-million people, and lesser pandemics occurred in 1957 and 1968.
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/ 7 February 2004
A major aftershock rattled the northwestern Papua town of Nabire on Saturday, one day after a powerful quake killed 24 people in the same town. The National Earthquake Centre at the meteorology and geophysics bureau said the aftershock measured 6,2 on the Richter scale.
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/ 7 February 2004
Hail a taxi in New York City, and the odds are that your driver will be a wise-cracking male cabbie who’s unafraid to share his philosophy about life with you. But, do the same in Kampala, and you may just get a sharp female graduate who’s turned to taxi driving as a way of getting ahead in Uganda’s uncertain job market.
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/ 7 February 2004
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) commended President Thabo Mbeki on Friday for acknowledging South Africa’s problems but criticised him for implying government policies are unalterable. ”The speech also … identifies the massive problems confronting the majority of our people,” a Cosatu spokesperson said.
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/ 7 February 2004
Swiss big business on Friday endorsed South Africa’s economic policies, but cautioned that legislation such as black economic empowerment could blunt the country’s competitive edge. ”Laws should be limited otherwise what we will see is apartheid from the other side,” a Swiss business leader said.
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/ 7 February 2004
As an Amnesty report revealed this week, the Chinese government is using an increasingly heavy hand to try to silence the growing whispers of opposition on the web. The group says 54 people had been arrested for disseminating their beliefs through the internet by December — a 60% increase on the previous year.
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/ 7 February 2004
Three years ago, a typhoon over the remote Ulithi atoll in Micronesia left a strong smell of oil in its wake. Within days, islanders discovered a large slick in one of their fishing lagoons. It came from the wreck of the USS Mississinewa, a World War II American oil tanker sunk in the atoll by a Japanese torpedo in 1944.
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/ 7 February 2004
British police investigating the deaths of 19 Chinese workers who drowned when they were trapped by a rampaging night tide while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, were on Friday night hunting the gangmasters behind the tragedy. Early evidence suggests the dead were working illegally for organised criminal gangs.
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/ 7 February 2004
The future of Germany’s chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, appeared to be in grave doubt on Friday night following his unexpected resignation as the leader of the centre-left Social Democratic party. Schroeder said he would carry on as the German chancellor.