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/ 16 September 2005
A prisoner serving 10 years for fraud wrote to a bank from his jail cell in South Africa’s North West province, requesting R10-million be transferred into an investment account he wished to open. He included a cheque dated 1995 from a company in his correspondence with a branch of a bank in Magopane.
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/ 16 September 2005
Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon has accused the African National Congress of trying to force taxpayers to service the party’s debt, using floor-crossing to maximise the amount of money it will receive. The amount of public money given to political parties is to increase, based on the number of MPs parties have in Parliament.
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/ 16 September 2005
Scientists are reconceptualising the HIV/Aids pandemic as a huge number of mini-epidemics, each centred on a hyper-infectious individual. This is in contrast to the idea of a rolling tsunami of infections, with HIV-positive people spreading the epidemic throughout the long asymptomatic ”chronic” stage of HIV.
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/ 16 September 2005
The African National Congress’s equal gender representation policy for the upcoming local government elections is expected to spark a scramble for positions as male councillors lose their jobs. The ANC decided at its national general council in June on a 50/50 quota of men and women representatives for the local government elections and all future polls.
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/ 16 September 2005
The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) was angered recently when Telkom called in the police to break up a picket outside Telkom Towers in Pretoria. The picket was organised by the FXI in response to the ”contempt” Telkom had shown the institute by failing to attend a forum held last weekend to discuss access by poor communities to telecommunications.
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/ 16 September 2005
New Orleans’s French Quarter with its historic facades — a pulsing microcosm full of jazz bars, piano bars, hotels, restaurants, sex clubs and galleries — might be able to return to its normal day- and nightlife since it was relatively undamaged by Hurricane Katrina. But the city is not taking any risks.
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/ 16 September 2005
The snail-paced Ophelia, downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm, picked up speed and moved out to sea early on Friday after a three-day drenching of North Carolina in the United States that was far less severe than many had anticipated. To the south, the storm’s gusty wind ripped apart businesses and damaged homes.
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/ 16 September 2005
Recent meetings with municipalities to discuss their finances were ”a disaster and a nightmare,” the Free State legislature’s public accounts committee said on Friday. The committee met municipalities during August to consider reports of the auditor general on the financial statements of all municipalities.
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/ 16 September 2005
The United States President, George Bush, on Friday accepted responsibility for his administration’s failure to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina. He also pledged that the government will pay for most of the costs of rebuilding the American Gulf Coast.
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/ 16 September 2005
The burst pipe that flooded Meredale in southern Johannesburg with 80-million litres of water in July was the result of corrosion and a 41-year-old bad weld, Rand Water said on Friday. Rand Water chief executive Simo Lushaba said the pipe that burst developed a leak along a seam that had been welded in 1964.