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/ 17 October 2005
They’re a famously dysfunctional family from small-town America but suddenly they have all learned Arabic and started talking like Egyptians. The Simpsons have changed their name to Shamsoon. Bart, the skateboarding, gum-chewing delinquent has become Badr.
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/ 17 October 2005
Having suffered the Nazi occupation of his native city, seen his father killed by communists, then been dumped in a post-war orphanage because his mother could not cope, Stefan Bukowski could be forgiven for being a pessimist. Instead the retired heating engineer (69) marvels at the chances opening up for his two daughters.
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/ 17 October 2005
A 57-year-old Somali man was arrested in Sweden early on Monday suspected of genocide in Somalia, a country splintered by clan warfare since the early 1990s, justice officials said. ”The man was arrested in [the southern Swedish city of] Lund and immediately transferred to Gothenburg,” said a police spokesperson.
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/ 17 October 2005
Though not posing a threat to South Africa’s financial-system stability, a total collapse in Zimbabwe could have wider political, economic and social consequences for the region, the South African Reserve Bank cautioned on Monday. Economic and political difficulties in Zimbabwe seem to be deepening, it said.
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/ 17 October 2005
A project to help improve the income of women slum dwellers in Cairo has achieved excellent results and is set to be replicated elsewhere in this sprawling city of 12 to 15-million people. When the Arab Alliance for Women moved into the small Houtaya slum in Giza, Cairo’s twin city on the west bank of the river Nile, in October 2004, it targeted 150 families living in four crowded streets.
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/ 17 October 2005
The growing threat of bird flu spreading across the continent is set to top the agendas of European Union leaders this week, after the deadly Asian strain of the virus landed in the continent for the first time. In the Far East, where the deadly H5N1 strain first emerged, the top United States health official held meetings with Indonesian ministers.
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/ 17 October 2005
More than 50% of urban South Africans have never gone a day without having anything to eat, research released on Sunday has found. Markinor, an associate of Gallop International, which carried out the study, said 73% of urban South Africans who participated in the survey had rarely or never experienced hunger.
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/ 17 October 2005
About 70 insurgents were killed in United States air strikes in the Ramadi region of western Iraq, where five US and two Iraqi soldiers were killed in a weekend roadside bombing, the US military said on Monday. Fifty rebels were killed on Sunday in raids by helicopters and fighter jets on a suspected safe house in the Abu Faraj region.
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/ 17 October 2005
A second powerful quake, measuring 5,9 on the Richter scale, rocked the western Turkish city of Izmir on Monday, a spokesperson for the Kandilli observatory in Istanbul said. The quake came only a few hours after another powerful quake. On Sunday, a moderately strong earthquake jolted central Japan.
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/ 17 October 2005
The five Sedibeng district municipality residents who were earlier reported to have typhoid are not critically ill, the council’s executive mayor Mlungisi Hlongwane said on Sunday after a meeting with President Thabo Mbeki, who visited the area on Sunday and spoke to officials about problems such as corruption and housing.