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/ 25 September 2007
President George Bush is set to announce new United States sanctions against Burma over human rights as the annual United Nations General Assembly gathering of world leaders gets under way on Tuesday. Bush will advocate supporting groups in Burma that are trying to advance freedom and announce new sanctions directed at key members of the military rulers.
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/ 25 September 2007
”In the light of the brouhaha about the nominations to the South African Broadcasting Corporation board, I’d like to ask a question: Are some South Africans eligible to nominate and be nominated to lead public institutions while others should rather be ignored?” writes Prince Mashele.
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/ 25 September 2007
A small inedible seed from a Mexican tree is seen by some as the answer to the world’s fuel crisis. But the seed from the jatropha tree, used to make biofuels, is still hugely controversial in South Africa and the government is not at all sure that the plant will solve the country’s biofuel woes.
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/ 25 September 2007
Asked in Tehran earlier this year about the possibility of a United States military strike on Iran, a senior official laughed. "Are you serious?" he asked. "They will never attack us. That would be madness." His amusement was genuine — and chilling. Ignorance and complacency about US motivations and intentions abound in equal measure in the land of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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/ 25 September 2007
The Federal Reserve, the United States’s central bank, slashed interest rates in a dramatic move designed to prevent the ailing US economy falling into recession. Abandoning its previous hard-line stance against inflation, the Fed cut by half a point both its federal funds rate — the nearest equivalent to the United Kingdom’s base rate — and the discount rate at which banks lend to each other.
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/ 25 September 2007
You might have expected Northern Rock to sound apologetic as queues formed outside its branches and its website was overwhelmed. Here is a bank that lent aggressively and tried to grab a big share of the mortgage market. Now its business model has been exposed as fragile and its brand damaged, perhaps beyond repair.
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/ 25 September 2007
In the first seven months of this year Africa saw $8,2-billion of new listings, already 13% higher than last year. Moreover, Nigeria, not South Africa, was the largest recipient of inflows for new listings. Africa has seen foreign investment inflows triple in the past decade from $10-billion to $30-billion a year.
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/ 25 September 2007
Terry Crawford-Browne has done something incredible. He has spent R5-million on a battle from which he stands to make nothing: his campaign to expose corruption in South Africa’s multibillion-rand arms deal. Not many people can understand this in an era of greed and opportunism.
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/ 25 September 2007
The European Commission got the green light from Europe’s second-highest court last week to pursue even more high-profile antitrust actions against dominant global companies. The court upheld the commission’s decision that the software group had also abused its dominance by illegally "bundling" its Media Player software into Windows.
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/ 25 September 2007
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has suffered an embarrassing blow to his prestige after his own party attacked him for adopting a jocular tone towards inflation at a time of rampant price rises. The Islamic Revolution Devotees Society has added its voice to a rising chorus of economic discontent by warning the president that spiralling living costs are hurting the poor and undermining his stated goal of social justice.