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/ 7 November 2006

No five-star treatment for Shaik

No special arrangements have been made for Schabir Shaik’s expected detainment at Durban Westville prison, media reports said on Tuesday. Correctional services spokesperson Sukhthi Naidoo as saying: ”He’ll be a prisoner like everyone else and will be treated normally.”

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/ 7 November 2006

World needs 15m teachers

That is the figure that the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), an international coalition of charities and teacher unions, believes is the very minimum necessary to achieve the target — agreed by the United Nations in 2000 as a Millennium Development Goal and reaffirmed at the G8 summit at Gleneagles a year ago — of providing universal free access to primary education by 2015.

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/ 6 November 2006

Fear and violence still rule gay township life

At an informal, unlicensed bar at a house in a remote corner of Soweto, men and women sip lukewarm beer, mingle, flirt and sometimes dance to driving and monotonous kwaito rhythms. They share a secret. The bar, called a shebeen in the townships, is one of the places where young, black gay people don’t have to hide who they are.

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/ 6 November 2006

Row over North West housing tenders

A controversial North West company with provincial government housing contracts worth almost R250-million has been implicated in tender irregularities described as "unheard of" by the provincial legislature. One of these contracts, worth R80-million, is for the building of 2 000 houses in Taung following floods in March this year.

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/ 6 November 2006

Brazil proposes fund to protect Amazon

Brazil, home to the world’s largest rainforest, will ask rich nations to back a plan to help it slow deforestation at global climate talks this week, a senior environmental official said. The plan marks a first step toward including deforestation in global climate agreements to cut emissions of carbon.

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/ 6 November 2006

Armed protesters cut Nigeria oil output

Output of 55 000 barrels per day of oil was cut in Nigeria when armed protesters on Monday forced the closure of a flow station belonging to Italy’s Agip company in the Niger Delta, an Agip official said. ”There were 48 persons — all local staff — on the flow station when it was invaded by the protesters,” said the official.

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/ 6 November 2006

Mathematician creates hardest sudoku puzzle

A Finnish mathematician on Monday claimed he had created the world’s hardest sudoku puzzle, a brain-teaser that required three months’ work and a billion combinations to produce. ”AI Escargot is the most difficult sudoku puzzle known so far,” the puzzle’s 37-year-old creator and applied mathematician Arto Inkala said.

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/ 6 November 2006

Many said killed as Ugandan army bombs villages

The Ugandan army said on Monday it had killed 12 people in weekend bombing raids against tribal warriors accused of shooting at a military helicopter over the country’s restive north-east Karamoja region. But sources in the area said the death toll was much higher and spoke of residents reporting as many as 500 people killed.