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/ 13 November 2006
Justine Henin-Hardenne won her first WTA Championships title on Sunday, beating Amelie Mauresmo 6-4, 6-3 a day after clinching the season-ending number one ranking for the second time. The Belgian won when Mauresmo double-faulted on match point — her fourth double-fault of the day.
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/ 13 November 2006
South African musician Jabu Khanyile died in the Johannesburg Hospital on Sunday morning. He had been undergoing radiation therapy for prostate cancer and he had diabetes. He played with different bands for a decade before joining Bayete, first as a drummer and then as the band’s lead vocalist.
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/ 13 November 2006
Former African National Congress chief whip and fraud convict Tony Yengeni
arrived late at Malmesbury prison due to car trouble, Beeld newspaper reported on Monday. Accompanied by two vehicles, Yengeni, who was out on weekend parole, arrived more than an hour late — a breach of the code of conduct for prisoners.
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/ 13 November 2006
Google has provoked the wrath of Iran’s notoriously suspicious authorities by appearing to question the country’s sovereignty over the province of Azerbaijan in an entry on its Google Video website. In a move tailor-made to wound Iranian patriotic pride and arouse a blizzard of protest, the Azeri provincial capital, Tabriz, is located ”in southern Azerbaijan, currently in the territory of Iran”.
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/ 13 November 2006
The newly emboldened Democrats stepped up pressure on the Bush administration for a change of course in Iraq on Sunday, with two leading members of the party calling for a phased withdrawal of United States troops to begin in four to six months.
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/ 13 November 2006
The road to Dowa could be any road in rural Malawi. Subsistence farmers scratch out a living from desiccated, exhausted soil and pray for the rains to arrive soon. The blackened stubs of trees are mournful witnesses that this area was verdant indigenous woodland not so long ago. Now their function as recyclers of moisture is lost and the water that evaporates simply disappears. Rainfall has diminished and the rivers have shrunk to muddy trickles.
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/ 13 November 2006
The poets are unhappy. First I read that Rian Malan saw only sad decay for our future. Then André Brink was being quoted around the globe spreading similar doom and gloom. Malan worried me no end. The last I heard, he was living in Fish Hoek or thereabouts with a person called the Princess, or something like this.
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/ 13 November 2006
Workers’ skeletons litter the mines of this land. Many of those killed underground were never retrieved; their families never had the opportunity to bury them decently, according to African rituals and tradition. In the worst disasters the recovered mineworkers are often unidentifiable and those families that insist on remains for ritual burials risk interring the wrong body.
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/ 13 November 2006
Australia’s blistering summer has only just begun, but reservoir levels are dropping fast, crop forecasts have been slashed, and great swathes of the continent are entering what scientists this week called a "one-in-1 000-years drought”. With many regions now in their fifth year of drought, the government called an emergency water summit in Canberra.
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/ 13 November 2006
Rumour has it that Tony Leon is leaving the DA to start a new party called the Neo-Malthusians. Its founding credo aims to make all South Africans rich because poor people take up too much space, eat too much food and drink too much water. The new party is inspired by the ideas of political economist Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 postulated that high fertility among the poor was responsible for stripping the Earth’s resources.