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/ 22 January 2007
"While you sleep!" is a catchphrase on hundreds of internet sites selling products that are supposed to help you, for example, "overcome fear of clowns" and "master the bagpipes". "Sleep learning" comes out of the "self-empowerment" movement, dating back to the 1930s. Instructions on how to do all manner of things while having a snooze used to be contained in cassettes kept in the section of the bookshop next to macrobiotic cookery books.
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/ 22 January 2007
It’s just one of those Johannesburg phenomena you have to get you head around, I suppose. I currently live in the eastern suburb of Observatory and my nearest friendly shopping neighbourhood for food and such like is the formerly predominantly Jewish suburb of Cyrildene.
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/ 22 January 2007
All true French leaders boast of their cultured side: Jacques Chirac loves African artefacts, Georges Pompidou adored modern art and Charles de Gaulle devoured the classics. But the centre-right presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, despite his devotion to chanson francaise and his friendship with the ageing rock star Johnny Hallyday, has seen the need to boost his literary credentials.
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/ 22 January 2007
Unit trust inflows had a record year last year, with net inflows reaching R58,2-billion. But this doesn’t mean that people are saving. According to Anil Thakersee of Old Mutual, the bulk of their inflows were lump sums as a result of retirement. Debit orders, which provide a better measure of consistent savings, account for only 3% of total inflows.
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/ 22 January 2007
To sceptics they are naive Westerners seduced by hype who would not recognise communist tyranny if it expropriated their sandals. ”Malodorous, leftwing, US and European peace creeps armed with mom’s credit card and brand new Birkenstocks,” according to American Thinker, a right-wing magazine.
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/ 22 January 2007
The swashbuckling colonial novelist remains a persistent feature of many books on Africa. Events are not merely reported, but interpreted through the incredulous eyes of our intrepid ”white man in Africa”. Curiously, this retrograde genre remains extremely popular in South Africa.
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/ 22 January 2007
Senior Zimbabwe government officials, including the police, have been sucked into a diamond smuggling scandal, which is believed to have cost the country about -million in lost revenue in the past eight months. In April last year, thousands of villagers descended on Marange, a district in the eastern Manicaland province, to pan for diamonds with the permission of the political leadership in the province.
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/ 22 January 2007
The sun has dropped below the horizon and the muezzins in Gaza and Egypt produce two distinct walls of sound at either side of the deserted strip that buffers the border. Darkness falls quickly on the no-man’s land that used to be patrolled by Israeli tanks. The 100m-wide strip is a graveyard of bulldozed houses. Mounds of rubble and steel spikes are monuments to what used to be streets.
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/ 22 January 2007
Whoever wants to be the next president of the African National Congress will probably have to go through president Thabo Mbeki, who has been asked by the party’s most influential province to guide the 95-year-old ANC towards its centenary years. Senior members of the Eastern Cape provincial executive committee (PEC) of the ANC are convinced that this “son of the soil will never say no to a mandate by the ANC”.
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/ 22 January 2007
In the past few years, South Africa’s currency has gained recognition as one of a handful of the world’s traded commodity currencies. This term applies in countries where the world commodity price of the country’s commodity exports has an important effect on their real exchange rate.