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/ 14 September 2005
The rituals and religious traditions of weddings may differ from culture to culture, but the world over they’re essentially about the same thing: uniting not only a man and a woman, but their families as well.
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/ 14 September 2005
Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, recently described the findings of the investigation into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal as "painful" and "embarrassing" and underlined an urgent need for reform of the world organisation. Annan accepted personal responsibility, but made it clear he was not going to resign.
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/ 14 September 2005
Truth is stranger than fiction. Yes, that’s the clunky theme this week, which hopefully will hold this column together to give it the appearance of being a well thought-out exploration into the nature of life, reality and our place in the universe, using the metaphor of strange news and new discoveries as a vehicle for conveying this.
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/ 14 September 2005
Three senior officials of the collapsed Saambou Bank appeared in the Pretoria Regional Court on Wednesday on 13 financial charges involving about R640-million. Gerhardus De Clerck, Johan Myburgh and Charles Edwards face 10 charges of fraud, one of theft and two of contravening the Companies Act.
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/ 14 September 2005
Until recently, only the privileged few who earned enough to belong to the private bank club received the benefits of debt consolidation. Debt consolidation is basically the consolidation of one’s debt into a single account, which usually forms part of your home loan and therefore attracts lower interest rates. Several banks have launched debt consolidation products for retail clients.
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/ 14 September 2005
Is black economic empowerment (BEE) working? Most observers positively cite the data referring to the rising black middle class and the numerous media articles around the prospering retail sector. Others negatively refer to the BEE deal arena where concentration of wealth occurs and value added by the new owners is not often explicit.
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/ 14 September 2005
Many German car buyers shrug their shoulders at the mention of ”hybrid” vehicles. Cars with a petrol engine augmented by an electric motor are virtually unknown in Germany. In stark contrast to the United States, there are exactly 2 096 hybrid vehicles on German roads out of a total of 45,4-million cars, according to the Federal Office of Transport.
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/ 14 September 2005
In that pleasant land, the universal myths of Cinderella and Peter Pan — the woman who marries up and the boy who does not want to grow up — are re-enacted collectively every year in one of Africa’s most beautiful and heartfelt pageants: Umhlanga, the Reed Dance, in Swaziland.
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/ 13 September 2005
Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has dodged giving a definitive answer on whether government will pay a market-related price for land it might appropriate under its land reform programme. Speaking in the National Council of Provinces on Tuesday, she said the answer to this question was ”a yes and a no”.