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/ 9 November 2007
Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk is optimistic that his controversial ban on abalone fishing will be as successful as the ivory ban has been in saving Africa’s elephants from extinction. In his first interview since announcing the ban two weeks ago, he said there would be no abalone left in South African seas in a few years if drastic steps were not taken.
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/ 9 November 2007
Until this year, Robert Kazini had never given much thought to whether he was fishing in Congolese or Ugandan waters; it didn’t matter. Nor did it matter much to Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — until prospectors found oil here. Now, with both countries dreaming of billions of petrodollars that could flow from Lake Albert, an ugly and at times deadly dispute over their border is jeopardising the livelihoods of locals like Kazini.
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/ 9 November 2007
Can we read it or can’t we? The centre of this bizarre mystery is a doctoral thesis on disgraced former South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje submitted to Rhodes University in 2005. The thesis was passed last year and the PhD was awarded. Yet there appears to be an embargo on the thesis, preventing anyone from getting access to it, according to several people involved in the saga.
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/ 9 November 2007
Just four months before scheduled elections, and with a breakthrough in talks brokered by President Thabo Mbeki in sight, Zimbabweans are watching in dismay as the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) disintegrates and Zanu-PF tweaks electoral regulations in its favour. Recently, there have been violent clashes between supporters of the MDC and some of his most senior officials.
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/ 9 November 2007
The United States government is heading for the dock. The American Civil Liberties Union has launched legal action against it over its denial of a visa to prominent South African academic Adam Habib. And now that the US has revealed its reasons for denying Habib entry to the country, essentially accusing him of ”terrorist” activity, the backlash against the superpower’s government is intensifying.
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/ 9 November 2007
Two of the key figures in the genesis of the arms-deal scandal — Patricia de Lille and Andrew Feinstein — went public again this week, fanning the embers of a corruption storm that has been smouldering for nine years. Feinstein, the former African National Congress leader of Parliament’s public accounts watchdog Scopa, resigned when the party moved to curtail investigations into the arms deal.
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/ 9 November 2007
While the plastic bag tax has become a cash cow for government, bringing in R221-million since 2004, the company tasked with promoting the recycling of plastic bags is struggling to get off the ground. Buyisa-e-Bag, the company in question, has seen a mere R44-million of the funds generated since it became fully operational in 2005, leaving R177-million to churn around in the general fiscus.
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/ 9 November 2007
The jailed leader of a separatist movement in the south-east of Nigeria — known formerly as Biafra — was released from detention at the end of October in a move analysts hailed as a helpful and diplomatic approach by the government to the region’s problems. But the secessionist leader says he will continue his struggle for independence.
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/ 9 November 2007
The expectation would be that conversation with the chair of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies would be about anti-Semitism, the future of the Jewish state and the Palestinian question. These are, of course, the grave and pressing issues that concern the diaspora of Jews. But there is also the wave of confidence and joy that has gripped the South African imagination, writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
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/ 9 November 2007
President Pervez Musharraf’s ”second coup” amounted to a serious personal blow for Condoleezza Rice, the United States Secretary of State, and American counterterrorism and nation-building policies in the Pakistan-Afghanistan badlands. Whatever his other failings, the Pakistani leader is a gentleman of the English colonial school, writes Simon Tisdall.