Sumayya Ismail
Guest Author
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/ 5 February 2007

FNB to go ahead with anti-crime campaign

First National Bank (FNB) will go ahead with its anti-crime campaign but at a later date, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Monday. The bank withdrew its multimillion-rand initiative meant to pressurise President Thabo Mbeki into making crime prevention his first priority, apparently after meeting with security cluster leaders on Friday.

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/ 1 February 2007

Stuck in a zone of poison

Kabwe, central Zambia’s second-largest town and once a thriving base of lead and zinc mining, is one of the most polluted places on Earth. It suffers from large-scale lead contamination, the legacy of the town’s now-defunct lead mines that were run by the state-owned Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Investment Holdings until they closed down in the mid-1990s.

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/ 30 January 2007

Roberts hits out at SA’s ‘colonial media’

Nadine Gordimer’s controversial and now unauthorised biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts, on Monday took aim at South Africa’s "colonial media", saying contrasting views had been suppressed after the <i>Sunday Times</i> ran a critical profile on him. He was speaking at a reading of his biography on Gordimer, <i>No Cold Kitchen</i>.

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/ 22 January 2007

ANC on crime: Let us not be spectators

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) on Monday affirmed its commitment to the fight against crime, poverty and unemployment in the country. Speaking to the media in the wake of the party’s national executive committee lekgotla (meeting), ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said there needs to be ”unity and purpose” in the fight against crime.

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/ 16 January 2007

Consumers turn spotlight on Telkom

Frustrated South African consumers, led by the Telecommunications Action Group (TAG), will on Friday publish a full-page advert in the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> newspaper calling for the reform of the telecommunications sector in the country. "We took this action because as consumers we are tired … of the poor service," TAG founder Alastair Otter said on Tuesday.

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/ 22 December 2006

Theatre personality Fiona Fraser-Brewer dies at 77

"She was made of real grit, true grit, that was Fiona," actress Shirley Firth, says of her dear friend Fiona Fraser-Brewer, the eccentric theatre personality who passed away this week, at the age of 77. An independent and outspoken person throughout her life, Fraser-Brewer’s friends described her as someone who was committed to her craft and who gave everything to her acting.