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/ 9 February 2007
The United States federal body charged with protecting air passengers from terrorist attacks is asking governments around the world for permission to place armed pilots on international flights. The transport section of the Department of Homeland Security wants to extend the system whereby pilots are currently armed on a small number of domestic flights.
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/ 9 February 2007
A nautical confrontation was looming on Thursday night in the Southern Ocean between Japanese whalers and international environmentalists after the first contact was made between their two fleets near Sturge island in Antarctica.
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/ 9 February 2007
Rival Palestinian factions meeting for crisis talks in Saudi Arabia on Thursday night agreed to form a coalition government, but there was no immediate guarantee that it would be enough to lift an international boycott on the Palestinian government. After two days of talks in Mecca, the leaders of Hamas and Fatah agreed a list of ministers for a new national unity Cabinet.
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/ 9 February 2007
A few years ago, the opposition in South Africa released another of what had been a string of attacks on the failings of the state. The Auditor General had just made his report public, and its contents — a fairly damning catalogue of misspent or misappropriated funds — provided a convoy-load of ammunition to the shrill finger-pointers.
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/ 9 February 2007
First National Bank’s aborted intervention was ill-thought out and foolish, both politically and in business terms, writes Steven Friedman. "FNB risked sending a signal that it is prepared to pioneer a new form of business social involvement on an issue which worries its senior executives, but not those which concern many of its workers or account-holders."
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/ 9 February 2007
"If we don’t deal with these allegations in an open and truthful manner, they will come back to haunt us for years and years." These were my words to ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe in mid-2001 after giving him information I had in relation to the controversial arms deal, writes Andrew Feinstein.
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/ 9 February 2007
If you’re been in journalism long enough, you notice trends. Once, financial writers were pretty low on the journalistic food chain. The economy usually only made it to the front page on Budget day. But for some time now, business journalism has been part of the mainstream, writes Kevin Davie.
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/ 9 February 2007
The City of Cape Town is not alone in attempts to bring down the costs of its new 2010 World Cup stadium, according to the local organising committee, but it is definitely the most successful. Five new stadiums are to be built and five upgraded for 2010.
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/ 9 February 2007
No matter how well Botswana, Mauritius and other sparsely populated countries perform economically, African economic growth rates will continue to lag behind the rest of the world until the more populous countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia start pulling their weight, saya a new report.
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/ 9 February 2007
The Western Cape town of Paarl is the centre of South Africa’s tiny, but fast-growing, alpaca industry. In five years, about 1Â 000 of these woolly natives have been imported from South America. "It’s a growing industry, so the start-up and initial costs are high and the returns are slow, but it’s very good to get into," says Udo Mettendorf, who imports and breeds alpacas.