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/ 13 September 2004

Cubans brace for Ivan the terrible

One of the most powerful hurricanes of recent times rolled across the Cayman Islands on Sunday and is due to hit Cuba on Monday after causing more than 60 deaths in the Caribbean. Ivan was producing winds of about 250km and seven-metre waves by the time it struck the Cayman Islands on Sunday afternoon, swamping the coastlines of the vulnerable British dependency and threatening the 45 000 inhabitants.

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/ 13 September 2004

Extremists inciting civil war, says Sharon

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, accused extremist rabbis and settler leaders on Sunday of inciting a civil war against his government’s plan to withdraw all Jews from the Gaza Strip and some parts of the West Bank. Sharon banged the table at the weekly meeting of the Cabinet as he denounced his opponents’ call to soldiers to disobey orders to remove the settlers.

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/ 13 September 2004

US tools up as assault rifle ban expires

There are boom times ahead at the Christian Soldier gun shop, a small emporium with a wide array of lethal weapons and a display window advertising its telephone number: 661-AMMO. At midnight tonight, a 10-year federal ban on some types of assault weapons will almost certainly expire, and the proprietor of Christian Soldier, Rob Shiflett, expects a stream of customers for newly legal civilian versions of AK-47s and M-16s.

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/ 13 September 2004

Soweto is put on tourist trail

The tour bus trundles deeper through the veld and the passengers ready their cameras in anticipation. Various animals live here, but the visitors are only interested in taking pictures of the people. To the left, some are queuing for taxis; to the right, women hang washing amid a sprawl of shacks. Straight ahead is an open-air market.

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/ 13 September 2004

Four killed, 13 wounded in US assault on Fallujah

At least four people were killed and 13 wounded when United States forces made a new assault on Iraq’s flashpoint city of Fallujah early on Monday, with fighter jets blowing up a civilian car and house, medics said. Four dead bodies, ravaged by the missile strike, were taken straight to the cemetery for burial after a US warplane struck a civilian car driving along a new motorway west of Fallujah.

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/ 13 September 2004

Dyslexia ‘heavily influenced by culture’

Reading difficulties can be traced to different parts of the brain in Chinese and Western children, a team of American scientists say. In China, dyslexia appears to have a different physical origin, because the script, also used in Japan, is symbol rather than alphabet-based. The discovery casts doubt on the widespread assumption that dyslexia has a universal cause.

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/ 13 September 2004

Sasol workers end four-day strike

The four-day old strike at oil and chemicals group Sasol’s Secunda plant has ended. This comes after Sasol’s management reached an agreement with trade union Solidarity, in terms of which the trade unions will take part in the internal investigation into the explosion at the Secunda plant on September 1.

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/ 13 September 2004

Iran rejects EU call to abandon uranium project

Iran on Sunday flatly rejected demands to abandon its uranium enrichment programme, as a leading hawk in the Bush administration warned that the United States would act to prevent Tehran obtaining nuclear weapons. The escalation came as France, Germany and Britain joined forces with Washington for the first time to demand a halt to Iran’s fuel enrichment work.

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/ 13 September 2004

North Korea in mushroom cloud riddle

The United States and Britain were on Sunday night trying to discover the cause of a huge mushroom cloud spotted over North Korea. US officials played down fears that it might have come from a nuclear test. However, the White House was reported to have received an intelligence briefing that Pyongyang could be preparing to carry out a test.