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| | Inter Press Service News Agency |
 | | To combat social injustice and raise the living standards of this former Portuguese enclave on China's southern coast, Ho has proposed putting an emphasis on education, creating a special fund to address the needs of the elderly, overhauling the pensions system, and continuing to follow a policy of careful handling of public funds. |
 | | Of the 37,000 Portuguese citizens who were living in Macau until 1999, there are just 1,200 still on the peninsula today, and Portuguese is only spoken at home now by no more than 10,000 of the 450,000 Macanese, most of whom are of mixed Portuguese and Chinese descent. |
 | | Those 502 years began in 1498 with the arrival of Portuguese Admiral Vasco da Gama's fleet to the coast of India, which kicked off a long series of incursions, invasions and settling of colonies by the Portuguese, British, French, Dutch and Spaniards in the world's most populous continent. |
| www.ipsnews.net /africa/sendnews.asp?idnews=26747 (1007 words) |
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