Staff Reporter
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/ 14 July 2000

Volvo sets up South African export deal

Johannesburg | Friday 11.00am. VOLVO is to use South Africa as a base for exporting catalytic converters and alloy wheels to its global assembly plants. The plan, just announced, is one of the first of several countertrade projects to get the go ahead linked to the defence agreement between South Africa, BAE Systems and Swedish […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Magic of meeting Harry’s creator

Laura Tisdall (13) and Polly Tisdall (11) in Didcot, Oxfordshire The moment the Hogwarts Express steam train finally puffed into Didcot Railway Centre last Saturday with JK Rowling on board was just totally magic. We’d been waiting for ages and ages with hundreds of other people, clutching our copies of the new Harry Potter book. […]

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/ 14 July 2000

We need less, not more

Andrew Muchineripi soccer The annual pre-season Iwisa Charity Spectacular competition was a noble idea with football giving desperately needed funds to some of the many less fortunate members of our society. There was also a novel method of choosing the four contestants with phone calls and letters from the public dictating who appeared before the […]

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/ 14 July 2000

Endangered dogs sold to Chinese zoo

Fiona Macleod A pack of 20 wild dogs, one of South Africa’s most endangered species, has been sold to a zoo in China where wild animals are kept in tiny cages and are forced to perform circus acts. Estimates of how many wild dogs there are left in South Africa range between 400 and 500. […]

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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 […]