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/ 24 September 2004

Du Toit spearheads SA to 9th gold

Natalie du Toit spearheaded South Africa to its ninth Athens Paralympic gold medal with a world record 2min 29,98sec in the 200m individual medley on Thursday night, adding to the world record gold by Nicholas Newman in the javelin at the Olympic Stadium earlier in the day.

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/ 24 September 2004

African countries penny-pinch on Aids

Despite a broad commitment to combating the spread of HIV/Aids on the continent, African governments spend far too little of their own funds on intervention programmes, a new study has found. With the exception of South Africa, most relied, to a large extent, on donor funding. A review of national budgets showed that strategic plans to tackle the virus were ”poorly costed and budgeted”.

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/ 24 September 2004

SA tour to India will go ahead

CEO of the United Cricket Board, Gerald Majola, says the South Africa team will tour India in November, notwithstanding the current uncertainty surrounding the Delhi Police’s reported investigation into alleged match fixing. ”At this stage the tour we proceed as scheduled,” said Majola.

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/ 23 September 2004

Season of the beasts

Meteorologists oft-times speak about the greater cycles of global weather, recurring patterns sometimes aeons apart, sometimes separated by only a few years. Why do lemmings save up the years and then, obeying some mystical signal, rush to throw themselves off the nearest precipice? Which brings me to the subject of this week’s sermon: Wherever you look these days, you will find monsters in charge.

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/ 23 September 2004

SA fails the right to know

Promising transparency is one thing, but the South African government delivering it is quite another. If you want to know what is going on and have the temerity to ask, the chances are that you will simply be ignored. Rather than abide by their constitutional and statutory duty to respond to requests for public information, government agencies prefer to stick their head in the sand and hope the pesky interlocutor will go away.

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/ 23 September 2004

‘Not all Arab tribes are Janjaweed’

A top official from Sudan’s ruling party said on Thursday the government will not disarm ”Arab tribes” in the troubled Darfur region, saying they are not all members of the feared Janjaweed militia. ”The government and international community are not in agreement over the definition of the Janjaweed,” a National Congress spokesperson said.