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/ 22 August 2006

Armed bandits hit luxury Kenyan safari camp

Armed bandits raided a luxury safari camp near Kenya’s famed Maasai Mara game reserve early on Tuesday, stealing cash and passports from British and United States tourists staying there, officials said. About six men with AK-47 assault rifles and machetes stormed the Mara Porini Camp in a private conservancy just outside the wildlife-rich reserve shortly after midnight.

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/ 22 August 2006

Chinese villagers fleeced by hungry sheep

A flock of hungry sheep gobbled up banknotes totalling 100 000 yuan ($12 500) that were the public funds of a northern Chinese village, state media reported on Tuesday. A farmer who was also the treasurer of Linjiawan village in Shaanxi province was devastated when he found out the cash he had hidden underneath his sheep pasture was mostly chewed up by the beasts.

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/ 21 August 2006

Behind the war of words

Tensions between Congress of South African Trade Unions president Willie Madisha and its general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi ran so high that mediators were called in to settle their conflict. At its heart is a fight for the political direction of the federation, which has been drawn four square into the succession battle. Recently, communist leader Blade Nzimande was pulled into the fray.

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/ 21 August 2006

Hedge funds have a role in protecting savings

Retirement funds should include hedge funds in their investment plans to ensure they construct optimal portfolios to protect South Africa’s limited savings, said Warren Brown, the head of fixed interest and financial modelling at Old Mutual. Brown was reacting to concerns about the lack of a clear regulatory and taxation regime for hedge funds.

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/ 21 August 2006

Hamstrung Somali govt gets new Cabinet

Embattled Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi on Monday appointed a new, scaled-down Cabinet to replace a dissent-riddled government dissolved earlier this month. Gedi named the 31-strong slate as tensions rose anew between his weak transitional administration and Somalia’s newly dominant Islamists.

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/ 18 August 2006

China typhoon death toll rises to 436

The death toll in China from Typhoon Saomai rose by 106 to 436 on Friday with the confirmation of dozens more deaths in the eastern province of Zhejiang, state media said. All 106 new fatalities were in the coastal province of Zhejiang, which had previously reported 87 dead and 52 missing, Xinhua news agency said.

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/ 18 August 2006

Loose canons

Like many of my Protestant-born ilk, I was dismayed at yet more accusations of grimy carnal goings-on among the Catholic clergy. Not that, for even one lapsed Anglican minute, I believe one word of the lurid sensationalist twaddle of how children have been abused sexually by certain of God’s chosen representatives on Earth.

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/ 18 August 2006

These are a few of my favourite 1001 things

Hedonism is by definition an urgent philosophy. To demur, to decline, even to hesitate, is to fail. In a world in which all delights must be sampled, and all desires sated, there is no place for the passive thrill-seeker. If he lies face-down on the Ottoman in his vomitorium it must be because he has misjudged his ability to have sex with five people of various genders while eating chip-rolls and custard slices.

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/ 18 August 2006

September’s forthcoming attractions

<b>MOVIE MONTHLY:</b> <i>The Commitments</i> fans will enjoy <i>The Boys from County Clare</i> — no less for Andrea Corr’s acting debut. The ever-controversial director Lars von Trier stirs the pot with <i>Dogville</i>, starring Nicole Kidman, and fans of that famous lasagne-loving kitty will be pleased to hear <i>Garfield</i> is here.

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/ 18 August 2006

Commanding heights

Twelve years on, the commanding heights of the economy are finally being tackled in the service of the ordinary man and woman. In electricity, the regulator has found Eskom negligence behind the power cuts that caused widespread disruption in the Western Cape; that its highly paid executives were essentially asleep at the switch.

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/ 17 August 2006

Eskom denies negligence in W Cape outages

Power utility Eskom on Thursday said that in the case of the recent power outages in the Western Cape it accepted that there were oversights regarding some of its practices and procedures. However, this did not mean that Eskom had been negligent. Every technical fault did not amount to a breach of a licence condition or negligence, it added.

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/ 17 August 2006

SAB again warns of e-mail scam

South African Breweries (SAB) has again warned consumers about an e-mail scan that is being widely circulated in South Africa and which promises free products from the company. SAB initially put a warning out to the public on July 20 and the e-mail has once again appeared in the public domain, SAB said in a statement on Thursday.

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/ 17 August 2006

UN envoy calls on world to stay out of Somalia

The international community should refrain from interfering in Somalia and maintain a United Nations arms embargo, the United Nation’s envoy to Somalia, Francois Lonseny Fall, told the UN Security Council. In a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, Fall also urged the 15-member council to pressure Somalia’s government and the Islamists to avoid provocations.

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/ 17 August 2006

Counterfeit money hits Harare

Counterfeit money has come into circulation in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, less than a week before the complete changeover to a new currency introduced by Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono last week. The counterfeiters appear to be targeting street vendors and other unsuspecting traders.

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/ 16 August 2006

Nearly 900 killed or missing in Ethiopian floods

The death toll from devastating floods in south-west Ethiopia soared to 364 on Wednesday, police said, bringing to almost 900 the number killed or missing in raging waters nationwide this month. Authorities said they feared for the worst and were preparing for the possibility that several hundred more may have drowned from weekend flooding.

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/ 16 August 2006

First anthrax death in UK in nearly 20 years

A 50-year-old man is believed to have died from the rare anthrax disease, British health officials said on Wednesday, in the first apparent case in Scotland in nearly 20 years. The man, who lived in the Scottish Borders region, died on July 8 after a short illness and laboratory tests have shown that the disease is likely to have been the cause of death, health officials said.

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/ 16 August 2006

Zimbabwe law society under attack

The Law Society of Zimbabwe, an independent and self-regulating professional body of Zimbabwean lawyers, is under increasing attack by the government of Zimbabwe, according to Nicole Fritz, director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre. She said two recent articles made plain the Zimbabwean government’s intention to clamp down on the law society.

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/ 16 August 2006

Ethiopia braces for jump in flood death toll

Ethiopia braced on Wednesday for a sharp rise in the death toll from flash floods that have killed at least 455 people in the south and east of the country this month and have now spread north. As efforts continued to rescue up to 20&nbsp;000 people marooned in the south and locate 250 missing in the east, new floods were reported north of the capital.