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/ 11 August 2005

Zimbabwe accused of blocking aid

Zimbabwean authorities are blocking aid to about 2 300 people resettled on a farm outside Harare following a government demolitions campaign, rights and church groups said on Wednesday. ”The people are living in the open with little food, no shelter. Access to these people has not been easy,” said Alouis Chaumba, director for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.

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/ 11 August 2005

Bill Gates goes after the ‘Spam King’

It is not often that computer users cheer a victory for Microsoft, the software firm whose uncompromising success has made founder Bill Gates the world’s richest man. But many will have shared his satisfaction on Wednesday after the computer giant claimed a victory when a man dubbed the ”Spam King” agreed to pay the company -million.

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/ 11 August 2005

Warming hits ‘tipping point’

A vast expanse of western Siberia is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn on Thursday. Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11 000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

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/ 11 August 2005

SA launches pan-African news service

African News Dimension (AND), a start-up media company, is launching a news service for the continent on 1 September 2005. Ralston Smith, CEO of AND, says the network will focus on providing video content, as well as audio, photographs and copy for sale through its website (www.andnetwork.com). <p>

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/ 11 August 2005

So much red tape

Politicians spend a great deal of our time and money passing myriad laws aimed at making us think they’re very busy people. The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed, so they’re obviously putting lots of effort into converting worthwhile tasks into bullshit just to impress us voters.

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/ 11 August 2005

Cheetah cheaters

The godfather of canned hunting in South Africa was a Portuguese man who owned a game farm in northern KwaZulu-Natal in the 1970s. He had a nice little scam going with Gauteng zoos, which sold him "surplus" wild animals. He took them in the back of his car to a piece of open veld in the Magaliesberg for "hunters" to shoot.

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/ 11 August 2005

Civilised norms vs local travel agents and airlines

So, you have a little bit of money and you want to go someplace. You can either rely on the glossy handouts from your local travel agency, or you can do a little bit of online snooping in advance — and create the mother of all trips for yourself. But let’s look at local prices briefly, which are sufficient reason for projectile vomiting all by themselves.

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/ 11 August 2005

What is Thabo Mbeki trying to achieve?

President Thabo Mbeki and his government are desperately trying to limit public embarrassment over the widely publicised political conditions they have reportedly attached to an emergency bail-out for President Robert Mugabe. They should have followed the diplomatic principle enunciated by classical Greek dramatist Euripides.