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/ 17 October 2007

Study idyll

Ventspils University College (VUC) is in the port city of Ventspils, Latvia, off the coast of the Baltic Sea. Latvia has been a member of the European Union since 2004. Ventspils is 200km west of the capital of Latvia, Riga, and 360km south-east of Stockholm, Sweden.

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/ 17 October 2007

Student exchanges: East meets South

The flow of students between South Africa and China is set to increase following a high-level meeting between Education Minister Naledi Pandor and her Chinese counterpart in Beijing a few weeks ago. An offshoot of the tighter bilateral cooperation between the two countries will be a R180million injection from China into modernising three further education and training colleges.

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/ 17 October 2007

Beware internet perverts

Parents and children are not equipped to be internet-safe. So says a study conducted among MBA students and lecturers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on "whether parents are aware of online dangers and if they are doing enough to protect their children online".

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/ 17 October 2007

Beyond Bologna

The Bologna Declaration of 1999 triggered wide-scale reform across the continent and, in the past few years, not only has the introduction of new degree structures taken centre stage, but a range of other European and national higher education and research issues have found synergies with the Bologna reforms to create a potent change process.

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/ 17 October 2007

Institution of unsolvable problems

The University of Limpopo is crumbling under poor management and governance practices, a ministerial report has disclosed. Drafted by ministerial appointee Professor Bennie Khoapa, the report recommends that he and his task team help the university fix wide-ranging problems in the next eight to 12 months. These exist in areas such as financial administration, human resource management, academic planning, governance and management.

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/ 17 October 2007

Confession — I’m babyphobic

There seems to be a baby boom at the moment. People are having babies all over the place, which is fabulous if you adore babies in general, but not so fabulous if you’re not that keen on them, unless they’re yours or closely related, then you can gaze adoringly at the little miracles for ever. I find that 10 minutes admiring the dinky little fingers and heavenly widgy face and saying, “What a lovely baby”, is about enough for me.

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/ 17 October 2007

Mongolia’s gold rush

Gingerly touching the bruises on her forehead, Enkhmaa — a middle-aged mother and illegal gold miner — explains why she is afraid to go out on the street with a green plastic bowl. Three days earlier, she says, the Mongolian police seized, beat and imprisoned her for wandering too close to a foreign-owned mine.

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/ 17 October 2007

If it changed before, it can change again

In the United Kingdom today only 5,6% of reported rapes end in a conviction. ”I think there should be a Women: where not to go tourist map,” says historian Joanna Bourke, only half joking. It was these statistics that enraged Bourke and transformed the writing of her latest book, Rape, A History from 1860 to the Present.