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/ 28 January 2008
Novak Djokovic stood toe-to-toe with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and soaked up everything the Muhammad Ali of tennis could throw at him before delivering a knock-out blow to clinch the Australian Open title on Sunday. Tsonga, nicknamed Ali for his resemblance to the former heavyweight boxing champion, was the crowd favourite to win his first Grand Slam but Djokovic was too solid and too steely.
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/ 28 January 2008
If a week is a long time in politics, it’s even longer in the dark. Today "world-class" Eskom is talking about power rationing, calling into question even the golden calf: foreign direct investment lured by low-priced (subsidised) electricity, writes Richard Worthington.
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/ 28 January 2008
Watching him receive a verbal pistol-whipping from BBC veteran Jeremy Paxman at a London press conference earlier this month, it was hard not to feel sorry for Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 19-year-old heir to Pakistan’s most perilous throne. Did the first-year Oxford student really think he was up to the job of heading the Pakistani opposition, even nominally?
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/ 28 January 2008
Above the crowd of thousands floated a red mattress, still wrapped in plastic. Underneath, holding aloft their new purchase, Kayad Shalafa and his brother Said were returning through the sand dunes of northern Egypt. They walked back over the trampled barbed wire, past the placid Egyptian soldiers and on to the blackened hole in the concrete border wall they had walked through that morning from Gaza.
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/ 28 January 2008
It’s super sexy, green and to be made in South Africa. A press release jointly issued by Italy’s Velozzi, a sports car manufacturer, and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) of South Africa announced a partnership two weeks ago to develop a range of sleek new plug-in hybrid sports cars.
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/ 28 January 2008
South Africa’s telecommunications landscape looks set for a shake-up with the first steps towards the unbundling of Telkom and Vodacom on the cards.This week Middle Eastern telecoms company Oger announced that it had made an offer to buy a share in Telkom, South Africa’s effective fixed-line monopoly.
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/ 28 January 2008
If you can buy insurance against something as inevitable as your own death, why not against that other great certainty, taxes? A small company, Qdos Consulting, recently received a licence to sell what it calls "revenue enquiry insurance" in South Africa. For as little as R220 a year, individual taxpayers can cover themselves against a tax audit of their books by the South African Revenue Service.
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/ 28 January 2008
Flood-torn Mozambique is holding its breath to see if more heavy rain will follow. Rising river levels have already displaced many of its citizens and flooding has destroyed houses, roads, bridges and crops. United Nations agencies said about 80 000 people in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have been affected by flooding since the start of summer.
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/ 28 January 2008
It has come down to Obama versus Clinton in the key southern state of South Carolina — but the Clinton that Barack Obama is up against is Bill, not Hillary. She flew out of the state late on Monday night, heading for Washington and then west to California and Arizona, leaving her husband behind to slug it out with Obama in the tough and rumbustious southern state that goes to the polls on Saturday.
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/ 28 January 2008
If you bottle up 1,5-million people in a territory 40km long and 10km wide, and turn off the lights, as Israel has done in Gaza, the bottle will burst. This is what happened on Wednesday when tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt to buy food, fuel and supplies after militants destroyed two-thirds of the wall separating the Gaza Strip from Egypt.