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/ 2 February 2007

A new age of denial

The signs are there. We are in a new age of denial. In 1999, President Thabo Mbeki, fresh in office and faced with the spectre of a new struggle, this time against HIV and Aids, turned his face away. He dabbled with fringe science, establishing a panel to attempt to refute that which was accepted by the world: that HIV causes Aids.

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/ 2 February 2007

Platinum-plated Parreira

Okay. You are one of the country’s top earners, raking in a touch under R2-million a month. You are only here until 2010 and so may want to rent rather than buy a joint to call home. New Bafana Bafana coach Carlos Alberto Parreira is reportedly looking to rent a house for R60 000 a month.

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/ 2 February 2007

Chaos hastens Iraq brain-drain

Six months after the United States invasion of Iraq, Esam Pasha, a 30-year-old Iraqi artist and writer, proudly painted a mural called Resilience over a giant portrait of Saddam Hussein on the wall of a government building. Now he lives in the US. Pasha is among hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been driven abroad since the war whose skills Iraq can ill afford to lose.

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/ 2 February 2007

Mbeki stalls peer review

President Thabo Mbeki on Sunday stalled South Africa’s self-assessment process under the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) for six months, citing technical problems, which civil society has dismissed as “nonsense”. His decision stalls a process that had been rushed to meet a nine-month time frame.

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/ 2 February 2007

A luxury we can’t afford

This year marks the 15th since the Rio Earth Summit and five since the Johannesburg World Summit. Looking back, we all need to agree that we have come too far to begin to cast doubt on the contribution of the resource base to development, or to forget that there is a “growth and prosperity case” for sustainable development, writes Pam Yako.

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/ 2 February 2007

Black is green

A faulty perception persists among black people that environmental issues are, at best, a matter for bored white liberals who have too much time at their disposal. At worst, the same whites are seen as bitter because employment equity and BEE now allows insolent darkies to drive around in large, gas-guzzling 4x4s, when the apartheid superstructure was hell-bent on keeping them poor.