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/ 25 February 2004

It’s written in the stars

How Stephen Hawking spent Valentines Day, the true origins of humanity, odd blobs on Mars and George Dubya’s little known cocaine habits — Ian Fraser brings you the world in one web browser. Take a look what you missed in mainstream newspapers this week.

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/ 25 February 2004

A dose of strong medicine

Three critical pieces of health legislation are about to be signed into law or are being drafted for future legislation. These are the regulations relating to a transparent pricing system for medicines and scheduled substances, social health insurance and the certificate of need.

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/ 25 February 2004

Tibet’s cry falls on deaf ears

When Lodi Gyari Rinpoche set foot on South African soil earlier this month as a delegate to the third World Conference on Democracy in Durban, he must have been struck by the historical parallels between this southern corner of Africa and his faraway spiritual home. This special envoy of the Dalai Lama believes South Africa has a moral responsibility to speak out against the situation in Tibet.

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/ 25 February 2004

No hope for a harvest

Last August when President Thabo Mbeki visited what his imbizo programme called a "land reform project" in Ceres, he was perhaps unaware of the Deo Volenti farm’s looming ruin and tattered relations between farm workers, shareholders and the trust’s chairperson. But without enough seed, equipment or support,
a land reform dream in the Ceres Valley has become a nightmare.

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/ 25 February 2004

419 scam going from strength to strength

The growth of information technology, however, that has been identified as possibly the biggest factor behind the 419 email scams’ expansion. It’s estimated that the public is duped into sending them hundreds of millions of dollars each year, with the United States and Western Europe worst affected. But despite these efforts, it appears the scam is going from strength to strength.

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/ 25 February 2004

Act before disaster strikes

In the first three months of the United Nations’s 2003 Iraq appeal, donor governments raised nearly $2-billion — $74 for every person in the country. In comparison, the Democratic Republic of Congo — where an estimated three million people have lost their lives in years of conflict — has received only $17 a person.