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/ 8 December 2003

Union wants retrenchment details from Iscor

Trade union Solidarity and South African steel producer Iscor appear to be headed for further conflict over the exact number of people the company wants to retrench. Solidarity spokesperson Dirk Hermann said the union wanted to know exactly how many people Iscor planned to retrench at all its plants throughout SA.

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/ 8 December 2003

Making a killing in the new Iraq

All day long, televisions, fridges and crates of food are heaved by crane from the ship’s overflowing hold to be packed into trucks waiting to race north to the markets of Basra, Baghdad and the northern Kurdish cities. Further along the dockside, a line of cars newly arrived from Dubai rolls off another ship.

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/ 8 December 2003

Discovering by doing

Like any business, South Africa has a "critical success imperative" — to make the poor productive. The second proposition, also derived from business writer, teacher and consultant Peter Drucker, is that managers — not nature, economic laws or governments — make resources productive.

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/ 8 December 2003

The only cure for Colombia

Colombia is in the middle of two wars. Civil war has engulfed the country for the past 40 years. However, the lesser-known, but now more destructive, war of street violence has over the past year caused more deaths than the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East combined.

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/ 8 December 2003

Capitalist pigs in Animal Farm

There is a capitalist pig in Ri Dok-sun’s garden. There are also two capitalist dogs and a brood of capitalist chicks. But even though Ri, a 72-year-old North Korean, lives in the world’s last Orwellian state, this is no animal farm. The beasts are the product of the growing free market pressure on a government that claims to be the world’s last truly socialist country — Korea.

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/ 8 December 2003

Africa’s forgotten conflict

Across a savannah ruled by no one, three brothers shouldered a bamboo pole. Their nephew had a broken leg but there were no longer any doctors there — nor vehicles, nor roads, nor telephones, nor electricity. They strapped Bolnevi Ngonstala (13) into a chair, tied it to the pole and tramped south where there was rumour of a clinic.