Staff Reporter
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/ 22 May 1998

Quest for the magic bullet

Sarah Boseley and Tim Radford Cancer is one of the world’s biggest killers. It is a stealthy predator, corrupting the cells of a healthy body, doing damage and hastening death without displaying, for a long while, any outward sign. The treatment is unpleasant and the outcome uncertain. Nobody can be sure they will not fall […]

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/ 22 May 1998

The Nazi legacy behind the bug

Hitler had two dreams. One, to take over the world. Two, to create the ‘people’s car’. Thankfully, the first failed, but the second lived on to escape its Nazi enslavement. Jonathan Glancey looks back on the social history of the Volkswagen Beetle When in January 1945 Adolf Hitler returned to Berlin from the Wolf’s Lair […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Living and dying with the enemy

The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda is often characterised as mindless ethnic bloodletting. Mahmood Mamdani provides a far more complex background to the conflict No two conflicting groups in the Great Lakes region have a longer and more comprehensive history of intermarriage than do the Hutu and the Tutsi. Intermarriage between the Hutu […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Bank sails into stock exchange

Ferial Haffajee ‘Steady as he goes.” The seafarer’s motto has served Don Ncube well, and next month this captain of industry steers his ship into new seas. In June he will list Real Africa Durolink, an investment bank of which he owns 37%. These banks are all the rage in this age of mergers, acquisitions […]

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/ 22 May 1998

The day the Nats rose up

Marion Edmunds gets to grips with how people felt 50 years ago when the National Party came to power The National Party today is a shadow of its former self, publicly regretting the policy of apartheid which brought it to power in the highly charged national elections of May 26 1948. Fifty years ago it […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Tales of township life

Fools, the film based on the short stories of Njabulo Ndebele and directed by Ramadan Suleman, opens on circuit this week, Andrew Worsdale spoke to the director Ramadan Suleman is a passionate guy. He uses his intense, piercing eyes when he talks and gesticulates powerfully. No wonder. He spent about 10 years in Paris and […]

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/ 22 May 1998

The most wanted watches in the world

Stewart Dalby They are not the most expensive items in their field, nor are they the best crafted, but Rolexes are the most famous watches. Virtually every month one of the four big auction houses, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips or Bonham’s, holds a watch sale and there are specialised dealers. But Rolex will have an auction […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Don’t get sick after midnight

Swapna Prabhakaran The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health announced an “inadequate” health budget for 1998/99 this week, sparking an outcry from hospital staff who predict it will have dire consequences for health services. Drastic cutbacks in services and staff have already been implemented at some provincial hospitals in preparation for the budget, which is R621-million short […]

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/ 22 May 1998

SAHealth in need of treatment

The response this week from state health officials to our story that some of their former psychiatric patients have been killing people is instructive. Valkenberg hospital, which treated and released the patients, says such tragedies in other countries prompt, at the very least, a full-blown commission of inquiry. Not so here. The Western Cape provincial […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Black president for rugby

Sarfu’s interim committee will be announced next week, with Silas Nkanunu at its head, reports Andy Capostagno Silas Nkanunu is set to become the first black president of the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) as part of a dramatic shake-up of the administration of the game that has been set in motion by the […]