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/ 13 October 2006

Cheetahs at large

Bloemfontein was in an odd mood last Sunday morning. On one side of town, rooftop parties were celebrating the Macufe soccer festival and the green and white colours of Bloemfontein Celtic were in evidence. Elsewhere, it was eerily quiet as the locals began to come to terms with the fact that the Cheetahs had qualified for a home final for the first time in 12 years.

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/ 13 October 2006

Leon: Mbeki has placed his head deeper in the sand

The whole of South Africa, and South African President Thabo Mbeki’s own parliamentary caucus, "is transfixed" by a crisis that has planed value off the rand, propelled shock-waves through investors at home and abroad and all but ground government delivery to a halt — but Mbeki has, with "masterly indifference", replaced his head more deeply into the sand, says Tony Leon.

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/ 13 October 2006

Looking for roots in Africa? DNA search not easy

African-Americans hoping to use DNA to find their roots may have to look harder than previously thought, researchers said on Thursday in a study they said shows Africans are too genetically mixed to make tracing easy. Several companies now offer to help Americans trace their African ancestry using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to daughter virtually unaltered.

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/ 13 October 2006

Award for SA Breweries boss

Tony van Kralingen, managing director SAB Limited SA, has won the Sunday Times Business Times marketing excellence awards chairman’s award, it was announced at midnight on Thursday. Van Kralingen won the award as ”a first rate marketing professional who now is the executive head of a major quoted company”, according to a statement.

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/ 13 October 2006

Migrant beheaded in front of daughter in Thailand

Suspected Islamic militants beheaded a Myanmar migrant worker in front of his teenage daughter in the most gruesome of a spate of attacks in Thailand’s troubled south. Several militants burst into the house of the 36-year-old prawn farm worker late Thursday, blindfolded his teenage daughter and shot the man at close range before beheading him, police said.

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/ 13 October 2006

Cosatu condemns SA rate hike

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Friday condemned the 50 basis points hike in the repo rate, saying that the hike would snuff out the glimmer of hope of increasing growth in the manufacturing industry. "This policy will destroy still more jobs and sabotage prospects of halving unemployment and poverty by 2014," Cosatu said in statement.