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/ 20 September 2007
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 small plane banks steeply to the east and the extent of the floods in the low-lying Teso region of Uganda become clear: kilometre upon kilometre of low-lying pasture land submerged, tens of thousands of hectares of staple crops like cassava, millet and groundnuts waterlogged.
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/ 20 September 2007
The rhetoric against media freedom is shooting through society. In the establishment the ante has been upped by President Thabo Mbeki and his political associates, Ronald Suresh Roberts and Christine Qunta, all of whom have conducted a sustained verbal assault on the media in the past three months.
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/ 20 September 2007
Gorging on sweets, chocolate and anything else you can find is hardly the most spiritual way to end a day, but for the month of Ramadan it could prove irresistible. After 12 hours in which it seems that everywhere you turn someone is munching on a cake, your self-control wears thin.
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/ 20 September 2007
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."
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/ 20 September 2007
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
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
My doorbell rang last week. They had come to collect the garbage. I trundled out one of those plastic bins with lid and wheels that are omnipresent across Johannesburg. It was full to brimming. But this was no ordinary bin. Blue with a green lid, it belongs to Resolution Recycling, which takes away your recyclables twice a month.
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/ 20 September 2007
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
Thousands of unemployed South African youths and an embattled social services sector will benefit from a bilateral cooperation agreement signed between the department of social development and the government of Cuba. Under the agreement just more than 9 000 auxiliary social workers will be trained in the next year in a move to provide relief to overworked social workers.