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/ 13 October 2004
A former British soccer player raising money for a leukemia charity set off on Wednesday on a coast-to-coast ride across Australia on a Victorian-era bicycle that is older than the country. Lloyd Scott dressed up as fictional British supersleuth Sherlock Holmes, complete with tweed coat, deerstalker hat and a fake mustache for the 4Â 350km trip from Perth to Sydney.
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/ 13 October 2004
A furious Michael Jackson hit out on Tuesday at United States rapper Eminem over what he branded a ”demeaning and disrespectful” video that mocks the ”king of pop” and shows him cavorting with children. The rapper’s Just Lose It video shows a Jackson lookalike on a bed surrounded by children.
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/ 13 October 2004
Famine in Africa could worsen unless action is taken to tackle the continent’s HIV/Aids pandemic, according to a senior United Nations official.
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/ 13 October 2004
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has said he doubted the United States’s strategies in Iraq, but he supported the war that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein blindly, Ugandan Information Minister Nsaba Buturo said on Wednesday. Buturo said Museveni feared weapons of mass destruction would find their way to Uganda.
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/ 13 October 2004
A fossil of an apparently sleeping dinosaur found in north-eastern China may provide new evidence that dinosaurs had similar behaviour patterns to those later evolved in birds, the British-based magazine Nature reports. The Mei Long fossil is a young dinosaur curled up in what appears to be a sleeping position typical of birds.
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/ 13 October 2004
Japan’s internet-arranged group suicides, in which nine people died, were organised by two women who had earlier tried to kill themselves together but failed. The nine who were found asphyxiated in two rented vehicles near Tokyo on Tuesday included a housewife, a college student and unemployed young people who had little in common save frequent use of the internet, reports said.
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/ 13 October 2004
Hundreds of families made homeless by a police raid in which their huts were burnt down on a farm in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West province have accused President Robert Mugabe’s sister Sabina of exploitation. In recent weeks police have begun evicting ”new peasant farmers” from farms in a move the settlers say is designed to clear land for senior members of the ruling Zanu-PF party.
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/ 13 October 2004
The two-day meeting of the South African Reserve Bank’s monetary policy committee started as scheduled at 9am in Pretoria on Wednesday. The consensus view is that there will be no change in rates due to surging oil prices and economists say the possibility of a rate hike is very remote.
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/ 13 October 2004
Zimbabwe’s main opposition party on Tuesday told Parliament that authorities have reduced the number of registered voters in urban centres, the party’s traditional stronghold, ahead of next year’s parliamentary polls. The party believes the number of voters in Bulawayo has been cut by 15% since elections in 2002.
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/ 13 October 2004
The South African National Treasury is currently dealing with 150 cases of unauthorised, irregular or fruitless and wasteful spending across the various government departments, involving amounts totalling approximately R1-billion, it emerged at Parliament on Wednesday.