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/ 20 September 2007

Najwa Petersen relative in court

A man facing three charges of possession of stolen property believes the media have turned his case into a high profile one due to his family connection to Najwa Petersen, the woman accused of murdering her husband, Taliep Petersen. Achmat Rylands was on Wednesday released on R10 000 bail.

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/ 20 September 2007

Brown to boycott summit if Mugabe attends

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown threatened on Wednesday to boycott a summit of European and African leaders if Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe is allowed to attend. He called on fellow heads of state to increase pressure on Harare before the planned December talks between the European Union and African Union.

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/ 20 September 2007

Spector judge, jury struggle to resolve impasse

The judge in the murder trial of Phil Spector on Wednesday abandoned the idea of presenting the deadlocked jury with a reduced charge of manslaughter against the music producer. In a day of complex legal manoeuvrings, both the judge and jury struggled to find a way to proceed in the case, which was stalled after seven days of deliberations.

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/ 20 September 2007

The billion-rand hole at Fidentia

Up to a billion rands of funds invested in Fidentia are unlikely to be recovered, say the financial group’s curators. One curator, Dines Gihwala, of Hofmeyr, Herbstein & Gihwala, says the company is expecting to recover only a further R300-million of the missing money to add to the R300-million already paid to investors.

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/ 20 September 2007

Johnnie Walker. Blue

It’s been extremely busy at the Sandton headquarters of the Blue Label Investments this week, which says a lot. The company, which has ballooned into a R12-billion-a-year juggernaut with 36 subsidiaries in the space of six years must be frantically busy at the quietest of times. The extra frenzy revolves around a bid to list on the main board of the JSE in November.

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/ 20 September 2007

‘First step of 1 000 miles’

It was all warm and cosy on Zimbabwe’s usually frosty political front recently, as Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change agreed on a set of changes to the country’s electoral laws. New constitutional amendments that the opposition previously said were meant to entrench President Robert Mugabe’s rule were read in Parliament on Tuesday.

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/ 20 September 2007

Many shades of opinion

I have lost count of the number of unwinnable debates I have held in the past few years with friends who are media ideologues. The essence of the discussion has been the same. It is that: "Rapule, we know you; you were a comrade but, unfortunately, you work for the capitalist media and he who pays the piper calls the tune."