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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.
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/ 18 September 2006
Local craft production — piggybacking on a national agenda obsessed with tourism and identified as a potential poverty alleviation sector — has increased in recent years. As has consumption. From the pavements of Durban to Stockholm markets, Niren Tolsi traces the various lives (and prices) of a piece of beaded jewellery.
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/ 18 September 2006
South African philanthropists say they like to support education, but their known contributions are a tiny percentage of what American private donors are spending here. Wealthy Americans spend far more on what, to them, is a distant and exotic country than our own benefactors do.
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/ 18 September 2006
There was a time when the tiny town of Alicedale in the Eastern Cape was a major railway junction between Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg. Now private-public investment to rejuvenate Alicedale, which started becoming a ghost town, and drastically reduce unemployment by 75% has yielded no results for many locals.
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/ 18 September 2006
When Madrid banned extremely thin models from the country’s top fashion show that began this week, it was the kind of measure that European society seemed somehow to be waiting for. The decision sparked immediate controversy among fashion professionals, politicians, in the media and on internet forums.
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/ 18 September 2006
Every day corporations across the globe welcome affluent executives into beautifully maintained, spotlessly clean offices. Few stop to think about the lives of the unseen, poorly paid cleaners who keep their offices this way. This week, workers from around the world stood together to focus attention on the long-running strike by South African cleaning workers.
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/ 18 September 2006
If anything gives the world’s second-richest man sleepless nights at his home in Omaha, Nebraska, it is the certainty that a nuclear holocaust will wipe out the planet. Warren Buffett is convinced the world will end in catastrophe — the only variable in the equation is when the big bang will happen.
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/ 18 September 2006
The year of waiting, the countless hours of planning — if not plotting — are over. Gordon Brown, it seems, has not just measured the curtains at No 10 Downing Street metaphorically. They have been ordered and delivered. Indeed, Brown is actually preparing to move into No 10, and not on May 4 or May 31, but possibly sooner.
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/ 18 September 2006
Mount Weather is a top-security underground installation an hour’s drive from Washington DC. A Cold War relic, it has been given a new lease on life since 9/11. Today, as the Bush administration wages its war on terror, Mount Weather is believed to house a ”shadow government” made up of senior Washington officials on temporary assignment.