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/ 22 January 2007
One of Cape Town’s largest and best-known companies has decided to up sticks and move to Johannesburg, in the surest sign yet that the Cape metropole has become little more than the visdorp its detractors make it out to be. Paul Hanratty, the new managing director of Old Mutual, explains that with both the company’s business partners, Nedbank and Mutual & Federal, already in Johannesburg, it makes sense to move the OM head office to Gauteng.
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/ 22 January 2007
To sceptics they are naive Westerners seduced by hype who would not recognise communist tyranny if it expropriated their sandals. ”Malodorous, leftwing, US and European peace creeps armed with mom’s credit card and brand new Birkenstocks,” according to American Thinker, a right-wing magazine.
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/ 22 January 2007
The swashbuckling colonial novelist remains a persistent feature of many books on Africa. Events are not merely reported, but interpreted through the incredulous eyes of our intrepid ”white man in Africa”. Curiously, this retrograde genre remains extremely popular in South Africa.
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/ 22 January 2007
Senior Zimbabwe government officials, including the police, have been sucked into a diamond smuggling scandal, which is believed to have cost the country about -million in lost revenue in the past eight months. In April last year, thousands of villagers descended on Marange, a district in the eastern Manicaland province, to pan for diamonds with the permission of the political leadership in the province.
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/ 22 January 2007
Whoever wants to be the next president of the African National Congress will probably have to go through president Thabo Mbeki, who has been asked by the party’s most influential province to guide the 95-year-old ANC towards its centenary years. Senior members of the Eastern Cape provincial executive committee (PEC) of the ANC are convinced that this “son of the soil will never say no to a mandate by the ANC”.
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/ 22 January 2007
In the past few years, South Africa’s currency has gained recognition as one of a handful of the world’s traded commodity currencies. This term applies in countries where the world commodity price of the country’s commodity exports has an important effect on their real exchange rate.
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/ 22 January 2007
About 25 000 public schools opened their doors to 12-million pupils last week, with apparent lack of drama. But this should not lull South Africans into assuming they are in for a quiet school year. Two time bombs are ticking below the surface: threats by some education bureaucracies against “under performing” schools; and complications that could arise from government moves towards free schooling for poor learners.
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/ 22 January 2007
The sun has dropped below the horizon and the muezzins in Gaza and Egypt produce two distinct walls of sound at either side of the deserted strip that buffers the border. Darkness falls quickly on the no-man’s land that used to be patrolled by Israeli tanks. The 100m-wide strip is a graveyard of bulldozed houses. Mounds of rubble and steel spikes are monuments to what used to be streets.
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/ 21 January 2007
The Titans duly won their SuperSport match against the Cape Cobras, which was played at Willowmoore Park, by 10 wickets. Cobras who were asked to follow-on, started the day on 131 for one. A second wicket partnership of 68 runs added a touch of respectability, but when Alfonso Thomas claimed the wicket of Henry Davids, the writing was on the wall
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/ 21 January 2007
A leading Roman Catholic rights group in Zimbabwe urged the government on Sunday to address the grievances of striking state doctors, saying their weeks-old action was hurting poor patients. ”The strike by junior doctors has caused untold human suffering and loss of life to many,” the Catholic commission.