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/ 16 September 2006
In an important policy shift, the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday announced that it is urging the use of the pesticide DDT to control the spread of malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that kills about one million people a year, most of whom are infants and young children in Africa.
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/ 16 September 2006
Gender principles and commitments fly through the window, old-fashioned myths on HIV surface. Usually outspoken, Blade Nzimande is reduced to mumbling. Structures remain silent or waffle. Unity is invoked while throats are torn. A strong left is essential. So how have we descended so quickly?
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/ 16 September 2006
A Ugandan newspaper is outing gays and lesbians because it considers that ”African culture does not condone this sort of thing”, Arinaitwe Rugando, a senior editor at the paper, told the Mail & Guardian. Over the past two months, Red Pepper has published the first names of 45 gay men and 13 lesbians.
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/ 16 September 2006
Forty years after Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, Russian terrorists tried to pack a plane with the stuff and fly it into the tsar’s palace. In 1883, Chicago-financed Fenians exploded bombs on the London underground. There has been little change in the preferred weapon of terror, the explosive device, or in the psychopathology of the bomber. The causes remain the same. What has changed, grotesquely, is the aftershock.
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/ 16 September 2006
Home Affairs Department portfolio committee chairperson Patrick Chauke says he will not allow his religious beliefs to interfere with the way he and his committee deal with draft legislation on gay marriages. He was speaking outside Parliament on Saturday, after receiving a memorandum from several thousand Christians to protest against the Civil Unions Bill.
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/ 16 September 2006
In the dusty, broken village of Aita al-Shaab, where almost every house bears the scars of the battle between Israel and Hezbollah, the war still lingers a month after it officially ended. Israeli tanks and bulldozers roam back and forth across the border at night, locals say, while Hezbollah fighters patrol the thick green hills above the village.
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/ 16 September 2006
The multinational oil distribution company whose toxic waste has killed six people in Côte d’Ivoire’s capital, Abidjan, this week expressed concern about the rising number of people who are falling ill, but said it had not violated international conventions on the disposal of toxic waste.
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/ 16 September 2006
There is a tendency in South Africa to think that the future is dependent on what happens in the political domain. We debate the prospects of long-term political stability and economic growth as a question of the future of the tripartite alliance, economic policy and globalisation. This is all very important. Yet it draws attention away from an area of South African society that may be equally important.
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/ 16 September 2006
French President Jacques Chirac was on Wednesday accused of appointing a close ally to one of the country’s top judicial posts to dodge corruption charges when his presidential immunity ends next year. Chirac has been dogged by corruption scandals dating from his time as mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995.
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/ 16 September 2006
Not many people at Nato’s Brussels headquarters are likely to laugh these days at the old joke that the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation actually stands for Now Almost Totally Obsolete. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Nato’s Secretary General, sees Afghanistan as a test of the alliance’s credibility.