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/ 23 July 2007

No Eassy walk to cable freedom

Africa’s east coast could go from having no undersea broadband cables to four. The planned East Africa Submarine System, touted as the solution for the bandwidth-starved continent, has been plagued by political squabbles that have resulted in it splintering into four mooted cable projects.

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/ 23 July 2007

Killed fighting trash

Sajida Khan (55) died in her home on Sunday night, during a second bout of cancer caused — she was convinced — by Durban’s largest dump. The Bisasar Road site, which handles most of the city’s rubbish, was placed directly across the street from her home in Clare Estate in 1980.

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/ 23 July 2007

Mr Mbeki, this is no way to treat a friend

As an Iranian, it is painful to recall that the Shah’s regime maintained close relations with the apartheid state, despite United Nations sanctions. The Shah supplied 90% of South Africa’s oil and held substantial shares in the Secunda refinery. In turn, the apartheid regime sold yellow cake to Iran and was closely involved in Iran’s nuclear programme, which unlike today was not a targeted programme.

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/ 23 July 2007

Reduce your speed

Stress affects one in five of the working population, according to the Stress Management Society, a non-profit group. ”Recent research shows that the body is designed to experience intense stress two or three times per month but we’re living like this all the time,” says founder Neil Shah. ”It’s like asking a sprinter to maintain their pace for a marathon.”

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/ 23 July 2007

‘This whole city will be a graveyard’

Togara Sanyatwe was buried in the West Park cemetery on the edge of Bulawayo at 83 years of age. The headstone reveals nothing more about his life, but he would already have been considered an elder of his community at the time those who now lie around him were being born. They include Zah Zah Ngwenya, who was just 28 at the time of her death on the same day as Sanyatwe.

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/ 23 July 2007

The third way

Tokyo Sexwale’s star is on the rise. He has secured a foothold in at least four major provinces where senior party leaders have been lobbying for his election as ANC president. A “national coordinating committee”, led by Gauteng finance minister Paul Mashatile and national executive committee member Enoch Godongwana, has been meeting once a month since Sexwale announced in May that he would be available for nomination.

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/ 23 July 2007

New hope for Korea’s divided families

Five years is not such a long time for the armies that eyeball each other along the demilitarised zone cutting the Korean peninsula in half. Their guns have been on a hair trigger for more than five decades. In fact, the frozen battlelines are such a feature of the landscape that part of them is now a Cold War theme park.

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/ 23 July 2007

A missionary for BEE

”If you remove the South African context, BEE is really about a company being a responsible citizen in the environment in which it operates,” says Andile Tlhoaele. ”In South Africa, we incentivise you for doing that.” Tlhoaele, the chief executive of verification agency Inforcomm, a director of the Association of BEE Verification Agencies and a member of the ICT Charter steering committee, is unsurprisingly bullish on BEE.