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/ 29 September 2004
A serial killer who chopped up one of his nine victims and boiled the body parts to cover up the evidence has been sentenced to death at a Chinese court, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday. In a country gradually growing accustomed to grisly murder cases, 37-year-old Tu Guiwu, who was condemned at a court in southwestern Chengdu city, has attracted particular notoriety for his actions.
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/ 29 September 2004
The Lone Star Iconoclast, the newspaper in George Bush’s home town, shook the small settlement of Crawford, Texas, on Tuesday by turning against its most famous resident and endorsing John Kerry. The decision has not made W Leon Smith, the Iconoclast‘s publisher and editor-in-chief, very popular among Crawford’s 705-strong population, a mainly conservative crowd who hope a second Bush term will invigorate the sleepy local economy.
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/ 29 September 2004
Some day soon your car could be speaking to you with a synthetic robot voice telling you: ”You’ve forgotton to lock up!” Or you could even ask it a question: ”Good morning, how do I switch on the lights?” A voice will respond: ”Turn the knob on the left”. Driving a car in 2010 will be a lot safer and more comfortable than today. The vehicle will be fitted with a host of ultrasound, infrared, radar and video and other electronic systems.
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/ 29 September 2004
Kenya is pushing for an international ban on trade in lion trophies and skins, arguing that the number of the animals has declined sharply over the years as a result of hunting, loss of habitat and lack of prey. ”The number of lions in Africa has declined by between 30% and 50% in the past 30 years,” said Edward Indakwa, spokesperson for the Kenya Wildlife Service.
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/ 29 September 2004
Two South African daily papers, and one weekly, still have a majority of white readers, ten years after apartheid was abolished. Four other papers have higher ratios of white readers in 2004 than was the case in 1994. This can be gleaned from the latest All Media Products Survey (Amps). Surprising? Scary? Evidence, yet again, of the reluctant pace of racial transformation? Not quite.
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/ 29 September 2004
Former security policeman Gideon Nieuwoudt has not made a full disclosure regarding his role in the 1989 Motherwell car bombing incident, advocate Kessie Naidu told an amnesty hearing in the Port Elizabeth High Court on Tuesday. South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported Naidu, who represented the victims’ families, as saying Nieuwoudt came with ”a lot of baggage and in his bag of
tricks was lots of lies”.
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/ 29 September 2004
The world’s first ever privately manned space craft was poised for relaunch on Wednesday as part of a bid to snatch a -million prize aimed at kickstarting commercial space travel. SpaceShipOne will stage its second sub-orbital flight in California’s Mojave desert, in what its creators hailed as the start of a new space race.
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/ 29 September 2004
Either 4,6-million or 8,4-million people had no jobs in South Africa in March this year — depending on whether one used official or expanded unemployment figures released on Tuesday. This translated into an unemployment rate of either 27,8% or 41,2%, according to the results of Statistics SA’s latest Labour Force Survey.
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/ 29 September 2004
A police task team has been appointed to investigate corruption following an exposé on SABC television on Tuesday night showing policemen harassing prostitutes in Johannesburg. ”We view the allegations in a serious light… at the moment we will be investigating corruption,” said a police spokesperson, senior superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht.
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/ 29 September 2004
Oil prices set another record on Tuesday, pushing into uncharted territory above a barrel as tension in Nigeria threatened to push petrol prices above the levels that caused fuel protests in 2000. United States light crude futures rose to ,47 a barrel in overnight trading, the highest price yet although allowing for inflation it is well below levels seen in the late 70s after the Iranian revolution.