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/ 7 September 2005

Bush to lead his own inquiry into Katrina

United States President George Bush, facing a political crisis over the government’s handling of relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, announced on Tuesday that he would lead his own investigation of what went wrong. ”We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there’s a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack or another major storm,” he said.

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/ 7 September 2005

‘I read the news today, oh boy.’

I glanced at a certain Johannesburg newspaper recently, and saw that it has cheerfully started putting single-word names next to photographs of "celebrities". For instance, there’s a pic of Robert de Niro, and below it isn’t a caption saying why the pic is there. Instead, there is a bright, colourful word: "ROBERT!". Hmm, this is journalism for dummies only. Or did I miss a meeting?

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/ 7 September 2005

Unexpected thrills

It was hailed as the biggest contraceptive revolution since the invention of the Pill. ”Johnny’s had a sex change,” went the publicity strapline, and in the eight months preceding its 1992 launch in Britain it had generated articles in the press and TV and radio features.

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/ 7 September 2005

I’m so lonely …

Nobody, give or take the occasional blues musician, likes to admit to being lonely. People who study loneliness, like Harvard University psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds, typically have to rely on anonymous surveys to gauge the size of the problem. On the Internet, though, anonymity is the default position, which explains the extra-ordinary story of what happened on the website Moviecodec.com.

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/ 6 September 2005

Damage exposure will ‘wake US up’

The devastation set to be revealed by Hurricane Katrina’s receding floodwaters will shock the United States, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin predicted on Tuesday as military engineers plugged one of the biggest gaps in the city’s levee system. ”It’s going to be awful and it’s going to wake the nation up again,” he said, estimating that it would take three weeks to drain the water.

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/ 6 September 2005

Iran could make nuclear bomb ‘within five years’

Iran could develop nuclear bomb-making capability within five years, but a longer timeframe is more likely, a leading thinktank said on Tuesday. A report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies found that international political opposition to Tehran pushing ahead with its nuclear programme made it probable that a 10-15 year timescale was more realistic.