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/ 18 September 2006
Australian daredevil naturalist Steve Irwin’s public memorial this week will not degenerate into a circus, the late crocodile hunter’s manager vowed on Monday. About 5 500 guests, including around 3 000 members of the public and VIPs led by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, will attend the final farewell.
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/ 18 September 2006
Glossy university newsletters do not conventionally stimulate deep reflection, far less memories of Stalin. So it’s perhaps a world first for UKZNdaba, the monthly publication for staff and students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. To the unsuspecting eye, the latest edition of UKZNdaba looks as anodyne as any of its genre.
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/ 18 September 2006
Rita Marley, the widow of late reggae musician Bob Marley, has been falsely using the name of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to garner publicity for a series of concerts she hopes to hold in the country early next year to commemorate the birth of her husband. The Africa Unite programme will be staged in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
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/ 18 September 2006
Rare cross-party agreement has been reached to provide MPs with 100% of their annual benefits packages after they have served three five-year terms of office. The sub-committee of the whips forum has also achieved broad agreement that MPs’ salaries should be at a level of a chief director, which is in the region of R580 000 a year.
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/ 18 September 2006
Paper giant Mondi has saved R38-million in energy and water consumption since 2003, by implementing energy efficiency measures. It saw a net cost saving of 27,2% for purchased energy and water by the end of last year, compared with projected consumption without energy-saving measures.
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/ 18 September 2006
Dissatisfied South African cellphone users who have been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to jump ship to another operator while keeping their number, will have to wait another two months. The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa announced this week that mobile number portability would once again be delayed.
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/ 18 September 2006
The T-shirt tells the story of the South African clothing industry and the struggle to maintain local production against the wave of cheap imports from China. T-shirts rose from 1% to 7% of total textile and clothing imports from China between 1995 and last year, according to Quantec data.
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/ 18 September 2006
In writing the bulk of his extremely useful book, <i>Making Mistakes, Righting Wrongs: Insights into Black Economic Empowerment</i> (Jonathan Ball with KMM Review Publishing Company), journalist and commentator Duma Gqubule tries to square the circle of black economic empowerment (BEE) as economic policy.
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/ 18 September 2006
Recently, the minister of health, officials in the department of health and in the Government Communication and Information System, President Thabo Mbeki and Medical Research Council head Anthony Mbewu stated that South Africa has the "largest treatment programme in the world" and the "fastest roll-out on the planet". This is simply not the case.
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/ 18 September 2006
There were 18 in Africa 35 years ago. There are 34 now — which begs the question: are policies to thin the ranks of the almost three dozen least developed countries (LDCs) on the continent even somewhat effective? To date, only one African state has managed to leave behind its LDC status: diamond-rich Botswana, in 1994.