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/ 26 September 2005
Malaysia said on Monday it will build three plants to produce biodiesel from palm oil, as part of efforts to reduce its dependency on petroleum as oil prices continue to soar on the world market. "Palm biodiesel is set to become a viable alternative to petroleum diesel," Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Peter Chin Fah Kui told an international palm oil congress in Kuala Lumpur.
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/ 26 September 2005
Oil prices remained below $64 a barrel in Asian trade on Monday as preliminary assesments showed key Untied States oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico had escaped severe damage from Hurricane Rita, dealers said. Reports that oil operations off the Gulf Coast suffered minimal damage from Hurricane Rita over the weekend were greeted with great relief by the market, which had been preparing for the worst.
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/ 26 September 2005
First National Bank (FNB) is the first major bank in South Africa to offer sharia-compliant banking facilities through its IslamicFinance bank accounts. According to Ebi Patel, CEO of Wesbank Islamic Finance at FNB, banking services have traditionally been out of the reach of devout Muslims.
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/ 23 September 2005
Interior allusions An ethnic sprinkle of babies sit in a cordoned-off clump in the centre of Franchise. They are perfectly behaved kiddies, not a squawk or dribble out of line, but like the sedated inmates of an old-age home they make you feel ill at ease (image right). Theresa-Anne Mackintosh’s cute and quizzical cast of […]
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/ 23 September 2005
About 30 animators and 250 crew worked for two years to complete <i>Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit</i>, now in the running for an Oscar.
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/ 23 September 2005
Instead of millions of rands being poured into official musicals about NEPAD that fail to inspire, it is the Jazzarts of our country that should be supported and recognised, writes Mike van Graan.
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/ 23 September 2005
Thank goodness I’m too old to join the humiliating queue of black actors looking for work these days. I no longer have to fret about black Yankees being cast in roles that African actors can fulfil with ease, grace and, dare one say it, the whiff of authenticity. I’m at peace, way beyond the petty debate.
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/ 23 September 2005
A 20-year-old Indonesian maid has been jailed for four years for injecting liquid soap into the feeding tube of a bedridden 85-year-old woman under her care. Dewi Supriyatin, who was sentenced on Thursday in a Singapore district court, committed the offence in February this year as she was unhappy and tired of looking after her employer’s mother-in-law.
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/ 23 September 2005
The South African Post Office made a R135-million profit from trading operations for the financial year ended March 2005 — an improvement of R108-million on last year. It was the Post Office’s second year of profitability. Cash generated from operations amounted to R371-million.
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/ 23 September 2005
Can’t seem to navigate China’s mammoth city of Shanghai? Check your map, it’s probably counterfeit. An increasing number of drivers in Shanghai are having trouble getting to their destinations when they rely on their car’s global positioning system because many electronic maps installed are fake.
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/ 23 September 2005
The roll-out of the taxi recapitalisation project has entered "a critical stage" and the Transport Department has targeted the scrapping of "at least" 10 000 old taxi vehicles from December 2005 to December 2006, says Minister of Transport Jeff Radebe.
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/ 23 September 2005
World oil prices eased on Friday, even as Hurricane Rita approached the coast of Texas, on hopes that the weakening storm might cause less damage to oil installations than first feared, dealers said. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in November, gave up 70 cents to $65,80 per barrel in electronic trading.
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/ 23 September 2005
Sri Lanka has announced measures to prevent voters impersonating the tsunami dead as well as special arrangements for those displaced by the calamity to vote in November’s presidential elections. Elections’ Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake said polling cards would be sent out to those believed to have perished in the tsunami but these will be marked to indicate the voter is dead.
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/ 23 September 2005
Insurer Old Mutual on Friday announced that it will proceed with its offer for Swedish group Skandia. Old Mutual said that in a consolidating financial-services market, the industrial logic of combining the two groups is compelling, providing prospects of enhanced growth with reduced risk for all shareholders.
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/ 23 September 2005
How frightened is the government about the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>’s revelations of the abuse of state funds in the Oilgate affair? Frightened enough for the police to launch an investigation into the <i>M&G</i>, rather than the main actors in the drama? To formulate flimsy contempt of court charges against us in a bid to gather information that might assist Imvume?
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/ 23 September 2005
When the government considers the merits of giving debt amnesty as part of its deliberations on the National Credit Bill, it needs to distinguish between people who are victims of unscrupulous lending practices and lack financial knowledge, and those who are repeat offenders, warns T-Sec economist Mike Schussler.
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/ 22 September 2005
Eleven African countries organising the next summit on the troubled Great Lakes region set for December will meet in Angola next week to prepare a pact on border security, a United Nations official said on Thursday. The meeting will also discuss protecting displaced people and setting up a regional certification scheme for natural resources so that they are not used to finance wars.
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/ 22 September 2005
An Indian newspaper advertisement that suggested parents would be blamed if they failed to buy pepper spray to deter rape attacks on their daughters was withdrawn on Thursday after a women’s group protest. The advertisement in several daily newspapers for Knockout pepper spray asked readers: "Tomorrow if your daughter gets raped who is to be blamed? The rapist or you?" and recommended the spray as a deterrent.
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/ 21 September 2005
The first of what Absa says are many benefits in store for its private banking and affluent clients as a result of the acquisition of a majority stake in the South African group by British banking group Barclays in July this year were revealed on Wednesday. Absa is launching the first two offerings in a series of joint lifestyle solutions.
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/ 21 September 2005
A court in India’s western desert state of Rajasthan fined an Israeli couple $22 for kissing in public after their wedding ceremony at a revered Hindu pilgrimage site, reports said on Wednesday. The court in Pushkar imposed the 1 000 rupee fine on the couple, identified as Opez Alone and Selev Kermit, for "committing an act of indecency".
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/ 21 September 2005
South Africa’s largest listed wine and spirits producer Distell on Wednesday announced that it had entered into an empowerment deal with a broad-based black empowerment consortium to be led by women’s empowerment group Wiphold. Wiphold is a company driven by a dedication to the empowerment of women, and black women in particular.
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/ 21 September 2005
South Africa’s Public Investment Corporation (PIC) has concluded negotiations for the acquisition of a 20% stake in state-owned airports operator Airports Company South Africa (Acsa) at a cost of R1,675-billion, the two companies announced on Wednesday. The PIC manages funds on behalf of government employees.
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/ 21 September 2005
At least 31 people were killed and about 62 000 left homeless when heavy rains pounded coastal areas of India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal, reports said on Wednesday. All the deaths occurred in India’s southern Andhra Pradesh state, which bore the brunt of Tuesday’s storms.
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/ 21 September 2005
Just to start the column in a way that’s out of this world, literally, consider this surreal item that went up for sale on eBay recently. I mean, you couldn’t make up a more bizarre object than a 1950s Soviet Space Monkey’s Flight Pants. (Oh well, as long as they’re thoroughly washed and disinfected …)
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/ 20 September 2005
Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana has called in a crack team from the International Labour Organisation to investigate why the National Economic Labour and Development Council (Nedlac) is not working properly. There is increasing concern that Nedlac is not living up to expectations, which were that it would be an essential forum for policymaking.
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/ 20 September 2005
A man attempting to walk the length of Britain stark naked for a second time was arrested once again — seconds after walking out of jail, police revealed on Monday. So-called "Naked Rambler" Stephen Gough (46) was stopped by officers as he left the gates of Edinburgh’s Saughton prison on Friday.
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/ 19 September 2005
A 60-year-old man shared a two-room apartment with his mother’s corpse for five years, concealing her death so he could receive her pension, French police said on Saturday. Intrigued that the woman born in 1904 still received social-security payments, social services in the port city of Marseilles asked police to investigate.
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/ 19 September 2005
An elderly couple stranded by the rising tide off the British coast stunned coast guards by not only refusing to be rescued, but hurling abuse at a helicopter crew that attempted to winch them to safety, officials said on Saturday. The unnamed pair were spotted being forced to shelter in a cove on cliffs after the tide came in.
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/ 19 September 2005
Russian newspapers celebrated on Monday the career of pioneering editor Yegor Yakovlev before and after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, following his death from heart failure. Yakovlev, a journalist and author of several books, died in a Moscow hospital on Sunday, aged 76.
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/ 19 September 2005
Absa expects South Africa to continue to experience solid economic growth for quite some time. "I believe that we’re likely to see solid GDP [gross domestic product] growth for the next few years," Absa CEO Steve Booysen told journalists on a trip to Mozambique where the South African bank has interests.
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/ 19 September 2005
"Politics and money are, for better or worse, inseparable. It is a reality of modern politics that parties require significant funds to operate in any meaningful way. The Constitution provides specifically for a ‘multiparty democracy’. It seeks to ensure that the widest plurality of political views are given expression," writes leader of the United Democratic Movement Bantu Holomisa.
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/ 16 September 2005
On Wednesday, he was just watering the dead bonsai juniper on his desk when his in-box pinged. Dave down in Concentric Redundancies had flagged the e-mail as possessing "Extreme Priority", as he did with all his messages: Mr Maseko upstairs had already had a word with Dave about sending photographs of a brown smudge on various hideous quilts.