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/ 21 October 2006
An artist has made a 900-square-metre structure entirely out of balloons to serve as a haunted-house attraction for Halloween. The Balloon Manor and its inhabitants — quirky, hilarious and somewhat creepy Halloween creatures — fill a wing of the Medley Centre mall in New York City’s Rochester suburb.
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/ 21 October 2006
”We will not resign.” That is the line African National Congress MPs who have pleaded guilty to charges of theft and fraud in the Travelgate scandal are taking with their party bosses. Five MPs who last year entered plea agreements with the National Prosecuting Authority were asked to resign their parliamentary seats.
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/ 21 October 2006
Members of the South African Communist Party politburo have advised its secretariat to be less combative and to raise its differences with the alliance partners in a more ”strategic” manner. They raised concerns that the confrontational approach was plunging the party into ”unnecessary” conflicts with the ANC and its leadership.
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/ 21 October 2006
Capetonians eagerly awaiting the outcome of the bitter dispute between Democratic Alliance mayor Helen Zille and the African National Congress over the city’s system of governance will have to wait a little longer. However, the battle for control of the city claimed its first casualty this week.
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/ 21 October 2006
Lesinewu opens his mouth and bites into an invisible tower of bread he is pretending to hold in his hands. He is in grade six and an athlete for Riverlea Primary, a small school in the south-west of Johannesburg. He says he needs six sandwiches because he is always running. Almost a third of his school’s 890 pupils receive a daily government lunch.
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/ 20 October 2006
Iraq’s prime minister sent an envoy to the southern city of Amara on Friday after clashes between Shi’ite militias and police in areas United States and British forces handed over to Iraqi control months ago. Violence between Shi’ite militias and Iraqi security forces have killed 15 people and wounded 91 since Thursday, a security source in Amara said.
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/ 20 October 2006
Morse code, the dots-and-dashes signalling system first used at sea on the Titanic and long since consigned to the scrapheap, made a triumphant comeback this week in the rescue of a stranded fisherman. The man had run aground near Hayling Island on the south coast when his boat began taking on water.
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/ 20 October 2006
Oil prices fell below a barrel on Friday, even though Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) made a deeper output cut than expected, on concerns that some of the group’s members may fail to comply with the curbs. ”There’s still a degree of scepticism over whether they will deliver all the cuts,” said a commodity strategist.
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/ 20 October 2006
The European Commission unveiled on Friday a new strategy to encourage peace and stability in the Horn of Africa, as two European Union diplomats were expelled from Ethiopia, inside the conflict-prone region. The strategy is more of a diagnosis of the region’s problems than a cure.
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/ 20 October 2006
He kicked off his sneakers, stepped on the scale in his white socks and smiled. Seconds later, the man once labeled the baddest man on the planet, the one who could petrify an opponent simply by stepping on to the apron, flexed his biceps for a few photographers and then giggled almost in shame.