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/ 12 November 2004
Sudan’s government has vehemently denied claims by the United Nations that it is forcibly relocating internally displaced persons from camps in the strife-torn western region of Darfur. "It is the responsibility of a country to relocate its internally displaced persons. We have not violated any international law," the country’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid, said at a press briefing in Nairobi on Tuesday.
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/ 12 November 2004
In the world of covert action and diplomacy it is called "plausible denial". In court it’s known as establishing reasonable doubt. In the Schabir Shaik trial this week, defence counsel François van Zyl focused on one crucial aspect of the state’s case — the alleged March 2000, R500 000 bribe agreement between Shaik, Deputy President Jacob Zuma and Alain Thetard, the local representative of the French Thales/Thomson Group.
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/ 12 November 2004
It’s not déjà vu. It’s yet another Mamelodi Sundowns versus Orlando Pirates showdown at the Loftus stadium on Sunday. It is now history that Sundowns won 3-1 in the Coca-Cola Cup last Sunday in what was rightly billed as the match of the round.
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/ 12 November 2004
The grand old lady of international rugby venues is closing down for refurbishment and the Springboks have been invited to the going away party. For those used to the matchless amenities of modern sports stadia, Lansdowne Road is a bit of a joke, but for those who relish the atmosphere that stands — as opposed to seats — confer, there’s nowhere else quite like it.
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/ 12 November 2004
Dying from a brain tumour is a rotten way for anyone to go. For a professional sports person, it is a particularly unkind exit. For Emlyn Hughes, it was the lousiest trick of fate. Hughes was a self-made footballer with ambition. To limited ability he added an unlimited zest.
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/ 12 November 2004
”It has often surprised me how difficult it is to speak across colour barriers, to people who do not understand your reality. Communication barriers arise when one does not recognise the other’s experience as authentic, real and true. I have started to feel quite oppressed by the presence of ”whiteness” in my world, or perhaps my presence in the white world.” A black professional in Cape Town feels like a foreigner in her own land.
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/ 12 November 2004
I would like to give readers an idea of what it is like being between the colour lines of black and white. Growing up as a child in the Boland, I thought of myself as looking like any ordinary human being, because I was not yet aware of the different races in our country. But in 1981 my family moved to Pretoria and a whole new dimension of being opened up.
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/ 12 November 2004
Shanghai is triply blessed with water: it sits at the junction of the nation’s biggest river (the Yangtze), an impressively large tributary of that river (the Huangpu), and the world’s biggest ocean (the Pacific). Yet that blessing is in danger of becoming a curse because of the speed at which China is fouling its waterways. The wealthiest city in China, Shanghai’s thirst has never been harder to quench, nor its effluent harder to manage.
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/ 12 November 2004
President George W Bush has picked Alberto Gonzales, the White House lawyer who advised him he could disregard the ”obsolete” Geneva conventions, as the United States’s new attorney general. News of Gonzales’s nomination, replacing John Ashcroft, who resigned on Tuesday, was poorly received by US human rights groups, which said he had shown scant regard for the importance of international human rights law.
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/ 12 November 2004
New cliques will form, fresh grievances will fester, but for now, as spring erupts into summer and the winter’s constrictions fade into long evenings, South African cricket seems to be genuinely, impossibly, happy. A little pragmatism, it seems, goes a very long way.