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/ 20 August 2007

Hollywood tears up war script

For Americans sitting in cinemas watching the summer’s fun movies, such as The Simpsons and Hairspray, the trailer for Lions for Lambs is jarring and unexpected. It opens with a moody shot of the Washington Memorial, and shifts to a series of quick-fire scenes about President George W Bush’s ”war on terror”.

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/ 20 August 2007

Vatican plans airways to heaven

The Vatican may have territorial limits, its own post office and even a football tournament, but it has hitherto lacked what all real states offer: an airline. That will be put right this month as the Vatican launches its first charter flights for pilgrims from Rome to Lourdes, with some of the world’s top religious destinations to follow, including the shrine of Fatima in Portugal and the shrine of the Madonna of Guadalupe in Mexico.

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/ 20 August 2007

Living in the shadow of Himmler

When Katrin Himmler was 15, a classmate at her Berlin school asked her during a history lesson if she was related to Heinrich Himmler, the feared head of Hitler’s SS and a key architect of the Holocaust. When she told them that he was, in fact, her great-uncle, the whole class fell silent and the teacher carried on as if nothing had been said.

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/ 20 August 2007

Growing up in a virtual world

In one of the largest deals of the web 2.0 era, the Walt Disney Company recently agreed to pay as much as -million to buy Club Penguin, a ”virtual world” for children between the ages of six and 14. When kids join Club Penguin, they adopt an animated penguin as their online alter ego, or avatar.

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/ 20 August 2007

Older climbers more likely to die on Everest

For the retired businessman bored with zero gravity flights, heli- skiing, flying ex-military Russian Mig fighter jets and swimming with sharks, climbing Everest can be the perfect next date on the adventure calendar. But research on more than 2 000 expeditions to the world’s highest peak has shown that older climbers are more likely to fail and more likely to die on the mountain.

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/ 20 August 2007

By design

First the gay and lesbian community got its own red carpet movie bash. Then every embassy in Pretoria wanted theirs. Then serious non­fiction film buffs got the Encounters film festival and hard-line political activists followed suit with the Tri-Continental festival and its focus on the countries of the South.

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/ 19 August 2007

Address the land question

With more than 80% of the South African land surface still legally in the hands of whites, it is a puzzle that the land question does not feature prominently in current political and economic debates. However one looks at things, land inequality remains one of the main indicators of social differentiation — and, indeed, it is at the heart of the struggle for citizenship and against poverty.

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/ 19 August 2007

Mbeki: No evidence, no action on Manto

President Thabo Mbeki will require evidence before considering media reports that Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was an alcoholic and had been convicted of theft, his office said on Sunday. The Sunday Times reported that chronic alcoholism was the real reason the minister had a liver transplant.