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/ 16 February 2005
Kenyan police on Wednesday fired tear gas to break up a crowd of several hundred protesting market vendors who had blockaded a government building in central Nairobi, witnesses said. At least two dozen police in riot gear launched tear gas into the demonstrators.
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/ 16 February 2005
A powerful blast occurred near Iran’s Gulf port of Daylam on Wednesday, Iranian television reported, as witnesses said they saw a missile being fired from an unidentified plane. Local officials have been dispatched to the site to identify the cause of the blast in an uninhabited area in the south of the country.
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/ 16 February 2005
A British fish-and-chip-shop owner pledged on Wednesday to embark on a 12-hour cooking epic to make the world’s biggest bag of chips. Kelvin Baines aims to make his mark by frying 1 134kg of potatoes at the Chip Stop in Plymouth, south-west England.
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/ 16 February 2005
Protesters gathered outside the United States consulate in Johannesburg on Wednesday, the day the international climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol came into force. The US has not signed the treaty. Demonstrators waved banners saying ”Stop US climate crime” and ”Beat the heat, beat the Bush”.
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/ 16 February 2005
The commander of the North East Rand dog unit appeared in the Benoni Regional Court on Wednesday following his arrest on charges of corruption. Superintendent Krishna Naidoo and his 29-year-old brother-in-law Keegan Ragavan allegedly approached a suspected drug dealer and asked for a bribe to make ‘surveillance’ of the man disappear.
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/ 16 February 2005
The head of communications in the Presidency, Murphy Morobe, has urged the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) to continue to speak out on the issue of HIV/Aids. ”You are our conscience,” he told several thousand TAC supporters who marched on Parliament on Wednesday to hand him a memorandum of demands.
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/ 16 February 2005
The Johannesburg Labour Court has granted the country’s oldest journalists’ union, the South African Union of Journalists, an order allowing its provisional liquidation. The union, first founded in the 1920s, has in recent years become dysfunctional, although it still has trust funds with considerable assets.
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/ 16 February 2005
Samoa appeared to escape the worst of Cyclone Olaf on Wednesday but a top official said it is expected to intensify and approach "super-cyclone" status as it bears down on neighbouring American Samoa and the Cook Islands. Olaf lashed Savai’i, the main island of Samoa, with winds of more than 200kph.
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/ 16 February 2005
Beeld newspaper editor Peet Kruger and freelance columnist Jeanne Goosen were ordered on Wednesday to appear before a Pretoria judge to explain why a column on the ”advocate Barbie” sex-crime trial contained wrong information. Judge Essop Patel ruled that the column appeared at first glance to be in contempt of court.
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/ 16 February 2005
An Islamic Sharia court in Kano, northern Nigeria, on Wednesday sentenced Abubakar Hamza to six months imprisonment and a fine equivalent to for living as a woman. Handing down the sentence, the court deplored 19-year-old Hamza’s use of female identity to sell aphrodisiacs and advised him to stop his ”immoral behaviour”.