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/ 11 November 2003
A new book by a German historian has cast fresh light on one of the most extraordinary episodes of WWI and revealed that the celebrated 1914 Christmas truce took place only because many of the Germans stationed on the front had worked in England.
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/ 11 November 2003
Zimbabwe’s first post-independence president, Canaan Banana, who was jailed for sodomy, died on Monday of an undisclosed illness. Banana (67) a former Methodist minister, was found guilty in 1999 of 11 counts of sodomy and abusing his power to sexually assault and carry out ”unnatural acts” with men.
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/ 11 November 2003
You don’t have to be a supersonic aviation nut to harbour a certain fondness for Concorde — and not many of those queuing outside Christie’s elegant auction rooms in central Paris on Monday were.
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/ 11 November 2003
The Bush administration has blocked compensation for US soldiers captured and tortured during the first Gulf war, arguing that the money was now needed for Iraq’s reconstruction. Seventeen former prisoners of war were awarded nearly -billion in compensatory and punitive damages by a US federal court in July.
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/ 11 November 2003
Judges cannot, simply by virtue of their office, be trusted with dispensing justice in South African courts. In October we saw at least two examples of judges whose integrity was questioned, or whose pronouncements were not befitting of the ”your honour” status bestowed on them.
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/ 11 November 2003
Last Monday listed financial content provider Moneyweb Holdings released interim results that must have made larger media groups salivate. With the six months to September 2003 showing growth of 747% in operating income and 490% in pre-tax profit against the same period last year, the lesson is you don’t need to own the media channels to do well.
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/ 11 November 2003
About 30% of people living with HIV/Aids worldwide live in Southern Africa, an area that is home to just 2% of the world’s population. “The most devastating social and economic impacts of Aids are still to come,” said Dr Peter Piot, UNAids executive director.
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/ 11 November 2003
Afrox Healthcare CEO Michael Flemming minced no words in telling shareholders how the company derived its growing profits in the year to end-September. Medical inflation, he told Moneyweb, was responsible: the company charged about 10% more than the year before, while 5% was organic growth. Pat Sidley explains why a free-for-all in medical-aid rates is the ‘primrose path of dalliance’.
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/ 11 November 2003
South African Airways’s (SAA) appointment of a new management team last week brings to a close a year of turbulence marked by the departure of key staff. The national carrier had been set on a stable foot-ing in readiness for international competition and eventual privatisation, said SAA’s CEO and president André Viljoen.
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/ 11 November 2003
It has been a bad couple of years for Spin Doctors. As a political species they are on the endangered list, cut down to size pretty much everywhere you look around the world. They have often been architects of their own misfortune — the demise of Tony Blair’s right-hand communicator, Alastair Campbell, being the prime example. In South Africa, thankfully, they soldier on.