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/ 31 August 2005

A Hack’s Dotage

Where should long-past-it journos go to live out their twilight years? David Bullard suggests the Hunter S Thompson Memorial Home, where volunteer carers write fan letters to the columnists and phone in to the mock radio station.

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/ 31 August 2005

Get some geek superpowers

I always am disturbed by people who seem to take pride in not knowing anything about computers. Especially if they use the things on a daily basis. That’s so passive and victim-like, it’s sick. The more you know, the less you need to be a passive, whiney, helpless consumer, at the mercy of evil geeks who will generally do their best to rip you off.

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/ 31 August 2005

Radical to be liberal

In his widely praised albeit controversial Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, William Mervin Gumede argues that opposition parties in South Africa "have been caught embarrassingly off guard" by the "dramatic repositioning" of the African National Congress.

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/ 31 August 2005

Rising from the rubble

The conditions in Nurma Sulaiman’s tiny room in one of Nusa’s six barracks have just become a little more cramped. But neither she nor her husband and four children are complaining, because the cause of their discomfort is the arrival of a sewing machine. ”Twenty-eight of us have been given these,” she said.

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/ 31 August 2005

Rites vs rights

As a cheese-eating, toyi-toying teenage ”activist”, I remember chanting ”Nonsexism! Nonracism!” And a third chant of ”Nonhomophobia”, which was a lot harder to get my tongue around, and even harder to argue to my sometimes socially conservative comrades.

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/ 31 August 2005

A shortage of compassion?

Under the African Charter and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, patients are entitled to a reasonable standard of health care, safe practice, dignity and respect. Where is the evidence that these currently exist in South African government hospitals?