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/ 22 January 2007
David Macfarlane is one of the better education journalists in the land. He has been a long time in the business and has a nose for a good story. He regularly peppers the education bureaucracies with emailed questions, from which he draws his own conclusions. He probably pays closer attention to the minister’s speeches than most others. But, in his critique of the role of the minister of education we have seen a blind spot, writes Duncan Hindle, director general of education.
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/ 22 January 2007
Is it perhaps time to say "<i>yebo baba</i>" to a bleached sphincter? Yes, you. Is your sphincter too brown? An open-ended question, if ever there was one. You can now have a sparkling brown eye by having it bleached. Some beauticians are billing it as the new Brazilian wax.
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/ 22 January 2007
"While you sleep!" is a catchphrase on hundreds of internet sites selling products that are supposed to help you, for example, "overcome fear of clowns" and "master the bagpipes". "Sleep learning" comes out of the "self-empowerment" movement, dating back to the 1930s. Instructions on how to do all manner of things while having a snooze used to be contained in cassettes kept in the section of the bookshop next to macrobiotic cookery books.
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/ 22 January 2007
It’s just one of those Johannesburg phenomena you have to get you head around, I suppose. I currently live in the eastern suburb of Observatory and my nearest friendly shopping neighbourhood for food and such like is the formerly predominantly Jewish suburb of Cyrildene.
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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
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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/ 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.