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/ 30 July 2007

New Bills await MPs as they return to work

The South African government has tabled six new pieces of legislation to greet MPs as they return from their month-long winter break to start the new term on Tuesday. The Bills, with one exception, are all amendment Bills tidying up earlier legislation or making arrangements to deal with problems that have arisen since the original laws were passed.

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/ 30 July 2007

Legendary filmmaker Bergman dies aged 89

Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century, died on July 30 at his home on the Swedish island of Fårö, his sister Eva told the TT news agency. He was 89. Bergman was widely acclaimed for films such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Fanny and Alexander (1982), which won four Oscars.

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/ 30 July 2007

JSE still firm but financials dip

At midday, the JSE was still firm, but was a tad lower than its strong opening this morning as the financial index started to pull back. At 12.01pm, the all-share index was 0,98% better as resources added 1,94% and the platinum-mining index climbed 1,20%. However, the gold-mining index was off 0,64%.

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/ 30 July 2007

Change isn’t always good

Don’t you just hate it when they take something you love and change it for the worse? Henry Ford didn’t upgrade his Model T by reverting to a steam engine, and nobody tries to build wide-body jetliners with propeller engines any more, so why did Hyundai South Africa take that lovely six-speed manual gearbox out of its Tiburon 2,7 and replace it with an auto — a four-speed, on top of it all?

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/ 30 July 2007

Tourists contemplate tragedy of war in Falklands

Braving a biting wind in the remote Falkland Islands, tourists comb through trenches and battlefields from the British-Argentine war of 1982, finding weathered combat boots and tubes of toothpaste. These visits to see the scene to contemplate the tragedy of war — 904 people died in 73 days after Argentina tried to reclaim the South American islands from Britain — have given a big boost to tourism in the Falklands.

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/ 30 July 2007

Fires leave trail of death, destruction

Six firemen died on Sunday while trying to bring raging fires in Mpumalanga under control, the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry said on Monday. The department’s commercial manager Kim Weir said five firefighters died after they could not get their vehicle away from the front of the fire.