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/ 18 September 2006

Ladies, let yourselves go

Women have moaned on about the lack of older women in the media for decades, but now things are getting more desperate. Even deeply beautiful women are being snipped, sliced, stitched up, pumped up, siphoned off — as if there is no life after the first wrinkle.

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/ 18 September 2006

Buying green cement

If there’s a substance we take for granted, but would have unimaginable consequences for modern life if we were to lose it, it’s concrete. It gives us much of the built environment we daily take for granted. Yet, as noted by a recent article in The Guardian, cement — the basic building block of concrete — comes at a high environmental cost.

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/ 17 September 2006

A space for the disgraced

Our political chickens, in different guises, are coming home to roost. Perhaps it is time to consider what the repercussions could be if we continue to reject and to ridicule those who try to deal with the consequences of their political actions. Quite apart from the sentence of the court, the behaviour of the accused too often condemns them to the ranks of fools, writes Antjie Krog.

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/ 17 September 2006

Crocodiles 0, stingrays 1

I can’t say that Australian "Wildlife Warrior" Steve Irwin’s passing inspires even the most transient distress. Rather it is a sense of relief that yet another exploitative human parasite has left us. And a parasite Irwin was. With his blustering invasions of the natural world, he personified slum-grade television.

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/ 17 September 2006

IMF announces sweeping reforms

International Monetary Fund policymakers on Sunday backed the most sweeping overhaul of the institution for six decades to give fast-growing China, South Korea, Mexico and Turkey more influence. The plan to overhaul the 61-year-old IMF, whose balance of power still largely reflects the economic landscape at the end of World War II, was given the green light by the IMF’s International Monetary and Financial Committee.

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/ 17 September 2006

Aids groups slam govt over TB outbreak

South Africa’s government long ignored warnings about drug-resistant tuberculosis, putting millions of HIV-positive people at risk now that a dangerous new strain of TB has emerged, Aids activists say. South African officials have scrambled to react to news this month that extremely drug resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, has killed at least 60 people in KwaZulu-Natal and is likely spreading.

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/ 17 September 2006

NZ favoured to win World Cup

New Zealand is heavily favoured to win its third successive Women’s World Cup rugby crown when it meets England in the final on Sunday at the Commonwealth Stadium. New Zealand’s Black Ferns have won 13 straight World Cup matches, including defeats of the United States in the 1998 final in Amsterdam.

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/ 17 September 2006

North West premier returns land to dispossessed

Over 4 000 community members from the rural town of Vogelfontein in the North West will receive land expropriated by the apartheid government, the North West provincial government said on Sunday. ”Today [Saturday] we all bear witness to the righting of the wrongs, to the return of respect and human dignity to a people who were unjustly robbed of these noble qualities,” said North West premier Edna Molewa.

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/ 17 September 2006

Five hundred Russian-made minibus taxis recalled

Five hundred Russian-made 16-seater minibus taxis are being recalled for the fourth time since March last year due to mechanical problems, the Sunday Times reported on Saturday. The ”Gazelles” were built as part of the government’s R7,7-billion taxi-recapitalisation programme and were approved by the South African Bureau of Standards.