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/ 22 December 2006
It was the sight of a gunman hitting his wife and threatening to do worse that drove a 64-year-old to turn on his attackers and probably save the lives of eight people, the Star reported on Friday. And this despite him being shot twice. On Friday morning, Neville Huxham was in the intensive care unit at the Milpark Hospital.
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/ 22 December 2006
Ethiopian tanks rolled to the battlefront on Friday as Somali Islamists and Somalia’s pro-government troops pounded each other with artillery and rockets in a fourth day of clashes edging closer to all-out war. The Islamists said they would send ground troops to attack en masse on Saturday, ast opposed o fighting from a distance with heavy weapons as the two sides have done so far.
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/ 22 December 2006
Rebels in Sudan’s western Darfur region said on Friday they had downed two helicopters and killed 13 Sudanese officers, and denied that 200 members of their movement had died in a government attack. ”The Sudan Liberation Movement and its allies categorically deny information put out by the Sudanese army on Thursday,” the rebel movement said in a statement.
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/ 22 December 2006
Pope Benedict spoke out on Friday against legal recognition for unmarried couples and ”dismal theories” on the rights of gays to marry, which he said stripped men and women of their innate sexual identity. ”I cannot hide my concern about legislation on de facto couples,” the pope said in a Christmas address to the Rome clergy.
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/ 22 December 2006
The Rating and Investment Information rating agency from Japan has upgraded the Republic of South Africa’s foreign currency long-term rating to A- (A minus) with a stable outlook (upgraded from stable BBB+), South Africa’s National Treasury announced on Friday.
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/ 22 December 2006
Police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi has urged 1 789 new police graduates to defend themselves in any way possible against police killers. ”There are elements that want to kill members of the police force, so I urge you to defend yourselves with whatever means [are] at your disposal,” he told them as they finished their basic training in Pretoria on Friday.
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/ 22 December 2006
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Friday he had been the victim of ”calumny and lies”, as he emerged from 17 hours of questioning by magistrates over an apparent smear campaign against a political rival. Villepin was heard as a witness, not a suspect, in the so-called Clearstream affair.
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/ 22 December 2006
Some secrets, it turns out, are too old or too big to keep — even for the Bush administration, which has made a crusade of rooting out leaks and clamping down on information on the inner workings of government. In the new year, the CIA, FBI, state department and more than 80 other government agencies that handle state secrets will declassify hundreds of millions of pages of documents.
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/ 22 December 2006
The decision by the Gauteng department of agriculture, conservation and environment to approve the ”unsightly” overhead section of the Gautrain through Centurion is shocking, the Democratic Alliance said on Thursday. Sizwe Matshikiza, spokesperson for the department, said the approval of the project had followed normal processes.
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/ 22 December 2006
Eritrean President Issaias Afeworki this week held talks with a Sudanese government delegation to boost dialogue aimed at ending a conflict in the troubled Darfur region, officials said on Friday. Issaias met the delegation, headed by Sudanese presidential assistant Nafie Ali Nafie, in the Eritrean Red Sea port of Massawa on Thursday, they said.