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/ 18 November 2005

Nigeria’s season of ethnic discontent

The release and re-arrest of members of a Yoruba organisation this week have marked the latest chapter in Nigeria’s bid to contain ethnic unrest in various parts of the country. Fredrick Fasehun and Gani Adams, leaders of the Oodua Peoples Congress, were initially jailed with four other members of the group after clashes broke out in the commercial capital of Lagos last month.

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/ 18 November 2005

Wheels come off in VW sex, drugs and money scandal

The corruption scandal at Volkswagen this year robbed Europe’s largest car-maker of at least â,¬5-million (about R40-million) in illegal kickbacks and theft, an independent report by auditors KPMG disclosed recently. The report brought closer criminal charges against Peter Hartz, the former personnel director and close adviser to Germany’s outgoing German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

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/ 18 November 2005

Ahmed’s gift of life

For once, the circumstances of a boy’s death from an Israeli bullet are not in dispute. The army concedes that one of its soldiers shot 12-year-old Ahmed Khatib during a raid on Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank earlier this month. Other Palestinian children playing with Ahmed have backed up the military’s statement that he was waving a toy gun.

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/ 18 November 2005

Riding on Zulu empathy

There is a good Zulu word that captures why African National Congress Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s guilt or innocence on fraud charges is not an issue for his supporters. It is ukusizelana — ”empathy” or ”mutual help”. ”It’s like this,” says Mike Zuma, a guest at the Friends of the Jacob Zuma Trust cocktail party on the Durban beachfront last Friday evening.

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/ 18 November 2005

UN rejects restrictive Guantánamo visit

The United Nations’s special rapporteur on torture has turned down an offer to visit Guantánamo Bay after the United States refused to grant the UN’s experts unfettered access to the prison. The UN’s panel of experts said that restrictions imposed by the US would make it impossible to judge the conditions under which around 500 detainees from the war on terror are being held at the camp.

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/ 18 November 2005

It is time for repentance

The Constitutional Court is expected to give its decisive verdict soon on the emotive issue of same-gender marriages. It will be announcing whether the Supreme Court of Appeal was correct in its judgement that such marriages should be allowed in accordance with our Bill of Rights.

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/ 17 November 2005

Hooded militant warns West of more attacks

A hooded Islamic militant thought to be one of Asia’s most wanted men has warned Western nations to expect more attacks in a video found in his slain colleague’s hideout and aired in Indonesia. A balaclava-clad man, believed by Vice President Jusuf Kalla to be Malaysian Noordin Mohammad Top, threatened Western nations in a recording recovered from the bomb-packed hideout.

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/ 17 November 2005

New Zealand to host Rugby World Cup

New Zealand were chosen by the International Rugby Board as hosts for the 2011 Rugby World Cup in Dublin on Thursday. New Zealand edged out Japan after South Africa was voted out in the first round. The result was never expected as SA, along with Japan, had been considered clear favourites to go head-to-head in the final round for the right to stage the rugby showpiece.