Staff Reporter
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/ 14 July 2000

Pottermania strikes again

JKRowling’s latest Harry Potter book, which arrives in South Africa this week, has caused hysteria in Britain. Its timing is just right Mark Lawson In a career of only three years, JK Rowling has changed book publishing. She has created a world in which novels – like new cars, grouse, Beaujolais nouveau and Star Wars […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Asmal’s school plan won’t be halted

Howard Barrell Minister of Education Kader Asmal takes his controversial plan to rescue South Africa’s school education system before a special meeting of all Cabinet ministers and deputy ministers in Pretoria on Tuesday (July 18) amid resistance in the African National Congress and the Cabinet. The combative Asmal, who is thought to have the support […]

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/ 14 July 2000

UK MODEL’S COVER-UP EXPOSED

A BRITISH model who flew to Cape Town earlier this week to promote the plight of thousands of penguins struck by an oil spill off the Cape coast is having something of an identity crisis. The saga began when the International Fund for Animal Welfare announced Alex Gain, winner of the Sun newspaper’s Babe of […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Lots of talk, not enough action

The Aids 2000 conference in Durban has focused the world’s attention on how South Africa is dealing with the pandemic Belinda Beresford South Africa has been one of the sleeping behemoths of sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to Aids. The country has the greatest number of HIV infections in the world, accompanied by a fast […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Villages where nine-year-olds head their

households Khadija Magardie Xolani Zungu (9) smiles shyly and unhesitatingly says, when asked what he wants to do when he grows up, that he wants to be a doctor. Like many boys his age, Xolani likes sweets, and playing with toy cars, and whispering behind the teacher’s back at school. But unlike his friends, he […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Drugs let the rich buy a few more years of life

Belinda Beresford The avalanche of Aids deaths flattening economies and smashing people’s lives is also rumbling at the heels of the pharmaceutical companies. Access to life-saving drugs, particularly anti- retrovirals, has been the cry of the Aids 2000 conference. For many that meant lowering the costs of drugs so that not just those in the […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Ask not what the planet can do for us

Steven Friedman WORM’S EYE VIEW When will we stop relying on others to do what only we can do ourselves? As the gloom which followed the frustration of our World Cup bid set in last Thursday, an apparently unemployed man who had been listening carefully to our team’s sales pitch exclaimed: “Now we will not […]

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/ 14 July 2000

SAFAIR GRABS R200-M AIRCRAFT DEAL

SAFAIR, the aviation leasing division of Imperial Holdings, announced three transactions worth more than R200-million, involving four passenger jets and a cargo aircraft. THE company has leased two McDonnell-Douglas MD81 jet airliners to Spirit Airlines, a US passenger carrier, for a period of eight years. In another deal, Safair purchased two additional ex-Austrian Airlines McDonnell-Douglas […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Long waits at the ‘house of torture’

Marianne Merten It is not unusual to see asylum seekers gathering outside the locked doors of Customs House on Cape Town’s foreshore as early as 7am. Hours later, the narrow linoleum-tiled corridor outside the fifth floor refugee office is a jumble of languages, frustration and patience worn thin among the dozens of applicants and home […]