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/ 4 February 2004
Sasol has discovered a promising new oil field in relatively shallow water at Ebouri, off southern Gabon, the company announced on Wednesday. The South African oil giant already has a 27,75% share in the 15 000 barrel-a-day Etame oil field, in the same region, which started operating in 2002.
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/ 4 February 2004
A member of parliament from Zimbabwe’s main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party has died from apparent torture wounds, his party has announced. The MDC alleges that the MP was abducted and severely beaten by a group of about 40 ruling Zanu-PF supporters.
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/ 4 February 2004
Apart from selling sunflowers and sheep to finance their alleged coup plot, the Boeremag also talked of ”hijacking” a grain harvest and arranging a cash-in-transit heist. According to a police spy, financing for the alleged coup would have included a crop of sunflowers and 200 sheep donated by farmers.
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/ 4 February 2004
More than 14 000 people living with Aids in Nigeria who had been receiving anti-retroviral drugs subsidised by the government are running out of supplies, an HIV/Aids activist group said on Tuesday. ”By June 2003 some centres had stopped administering the drugs,” the president of Aids Alliance Nigeria said.
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/ 4 February 2004
Warders at Pretoria’s local prison seemed to have a ”bizarre fascination” with gay sex, a former prisoner told the Jali commission, which is investigation prison corruption, on Wednesday. Former inmate Louis Karp named the warders he claimed had made his stay in jail a misery one by one.
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/ 4 February 2004
The number of people who drowned following a boat accident on Monday on a lake in north-western Uganda has risen to 42 after police retrieved 23 more bodies from the lake’s shorelines on Tuesday evening, a senior police marine officer said. The boat was overloaded with more than 80 people.
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/ 4 February 2004
A moderate earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5,2 jolted northern Japan on Wednesday, but there were no reports of damage or injuries, police said. The offshore earthquake was centered about 70km beneath the seabed just off the coast of Iwate prefecture, the Meteorological Agency said.
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/ 4 February 2004
Water scooped up by ships for ballast and dumped at the end of a voyage can cause as much damage as an oil spill by carrying marine life to new coastlines, environmental group the WWF warned on Wednesday. The water is loaded with marine species that can invade new environments when released in ports.
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/ 4 February 2004
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) on Wednesday accused world number two gold miner AngloGold’s Tautona mine near Carletonville of being the latest contributor to what it called the company’s "mines of death". This comes after two mineworkers died in an accident related to a mine elevator on Wednesday morning.