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/ 9 September 2004
A supercomputer used to create special effects in the Lord of the Rings fantasy film trilogy is now open for business in the real world of global commerce, backers said on Thursday. Ranked 80th among the world’s 500 most powerful computers, it can perform 2,8-trillion calculations a second, said New Zealand Supercomputing Centre spokesperson Eric Pilon.
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/ 9 September 2004
About 3 000 municipal workers marched on the headquarters of the Tshwane metro council on Thursday to demand an end to privatisation. The group, members of the SA Municipal Workers’ Union and the Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union, called for meaningful negotiations with the employer and threatened further action if this did not transpire.
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/ 9 September 2004
Yasser Arafat’s expulsion is ”closer than ever,” the Israeli foreign minister warned in remarks broadcast on Thursday, as six Palestinians were killed by Israeli army fire in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the single deadliest incident, in the northern Gaza Strip, soldiers opened fire from a tank-mounted machine gun at Palestinians, killing at least three, including a 13-year-old boy, and wounding nine.
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/ 9 September 2004
Women in labour so intoxicated they do not know they are giving birth, children fed alcohol to keep them quiet, and low grade wine cheaper than bread. These are realities in South Africa, the country with the worst foetal alcohol syndrome in the world.
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/ 9 September 2004
Cleaning up operations were under way off the Durban harbour on Thursday after an offshore oil spill dumped at least five tons of crude into the water and onto nearby beaches. Sapref, the Durban oil refinery, said the spill happened about two-and-a-half kilometres out to sea at a buoy mooring where tankers usually discharged crude oil into a pipeline transporting it to shore.
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/ 9 September 2004
African Union-sponsored talks on the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region hit another hurdle on Wednesday as the Khartoum government rejected a draft protocol on the key issues of security and disarmament. ”This draft, the way it had been prepared, contradicts obligations that we have already undertaken,” said Sudan’s deputy foreign affairs minister Najeib Abdelwahab.
UN urged to act on Sudan
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/ 9 September 2004
The remaining international aid agencies in Iraq are considering pulling out of the country after the kidnapping of four humanitarian workers, including two Italian women, from their headquarters in Baghdad, it was claimed on Wednesday. Jean-Dominique Bunel, a coordinator for the agencies, said the abduction on Tuesday had already prompted some aid workers to leave and others would follow by the end of the week.
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/ 9 September 2004
The British government on Wednesday set a November ultimatum for Iran to suspend all activities linked to production of a nuclear bomb — a deadline that effectively marks the failure of more than a year of negotiations between Tehran and the European troika of Britain, France and Germany.
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/ 9 September 2004
John Kerry accused the Bush administration of raiding state pension funds to pay for its ”mistakes” in Iraq on Wednesday as the campaign rhetoric expended on the ”war on terror” continued to grow. The previous day Vice-President Dick Cheney suggested that Kerry’s victory could lead to another terrorist attack on the United States.
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/ 9 September 2004
Lauren Bacall, the veteran film star famous for her smouldering eyes and sexy voice, launched an attack on Wednesday on Nicole Kidman, who co-stars in her latest film. Bacall, widow of Humphrey Bogart, with whom she appeared in classics such as The Big Sleep and Key Largo, took offence at the Venice film festival when Kidman was described by an interviewer as a screen legend.