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/ 30 October 2003
Pupils at state schools in the west African state of Guinea Bissau resumed classes on Wednesday for the first time in two years after teachers called off a strike over back pay. The union decided on Tuesday to call off the marathon stoppage after a meeting with Guinea-Bissau President Henrique Rosa.
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/ 30 October 2003
The Zimbabwe government has deployed military doctors and nurses to state hospitals that are reeling under a strike by state medical staff, the <i>Herald</i> newspaper reported on Wednesday. Health Minister David Parirenyatwa told the state-run daily that the deployment was an emergency measure aimed at avoiding loss of lives.
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/ 30 October 2003
The UN Security Council was to meet on Thursday to discuss a report on the booming trade in African diamonds and minerals which is continuing to finance what may be the deadliest conflict since World War II.
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/ 30 October 2003
Twenty-one people were killed on the N1 when a bus and a truck were involved in a collision near Beaufort West in the early hours of Thursday. The accident happened around 1am about seven kilometres outside Leeu-Gamka, between Beaufort West and Laingsburg. That strip of road is infamous as a ”death run”.
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/ 30 October 2003
Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by ”narco-terrorists” and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed. Two years after US airpower and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban from power, the world’s biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates.
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/ 30 October 2003
The number of US soldiers killed in combat in postwar Iraq rose on Wednesday above the number killed before May 1, the day President George Bush declared victory. Two soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb about 120 kilometres north of Baghdad, bringing US combat fatalities to 116 since May 1.
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/ 30 October 2003
When the rap impresario Sean ”P Diddy” Combs created his own clothing line, Sean John, he insisted: ”It’s not just a label, it’s a lifestyle.” But the lifestyle of those producing his streetwear, in a Honduran sweatshop, has been compared to ”slavery” in which workers are forced to take pregnancy tests and fired if the results are positive.
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/ 30 October 2003
South African cricket captain Graeme Smith conceded on Wednesday that the national team lacked a genuine strike bowler on their recent tour of Pakistan and admitted that ”one or two places are up for grabs” for the West Indies tour. ”I think we did need a guy with genuine pace,” he said.
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/ 30 October 2003
”I think you’ll be surprised by Samoa, said Nick Far-Jones at a Rugby World Cup press conference in 1991, and rarely have truer words been uttered. Four days into the tournament I was one of the lucky ones who watched Western Samoa (as they were then called) beat Wales 16-13. The point is that 12 years down the line it’s time we stopped being surprised by Samoa.
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/ 30 October 2003
South African President Thabo Mbeki is to meet the Federation Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) Technical Inspection Team while it is in South Africa to inspect the country’s capacity to host the 2010 World Cup.