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/ 11 November 2003
Zimbabwe’s first post-independence president, Canaan Banana, who was jailed for sodomy, died on Monday of an undisclosed illness. Banana (67) a former Methodist minister, was found guilty in 1999 of 11 counts of sodomy and abusing his power to sexually assault and carry out ”unnatural acts” with men.
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/ 11 November 2003
Judges cannot, simply by virtue of their office, be trusted with dispensing justice in South African courts. In October we saw at least two examples of judges whose integrity was questioned, or whose pronouncements were not befitting of the ”your honour” status bestowed on them.
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/ 11 November 2003
About 30% of people living with HIV/Aids worldwide live in Southern Africa, an area that is home to just 2% of the world’s population. “The most devastating social and economic impacts of Aids are still to come,” said Dr Peter Piot, UNAids executive director.
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/ 11 November 2003
Last Monday listed financial content provider Moneyweb Holdings released interim results that must have made larger media groups salivate. With the six months to September 2003 showing growth of 747% in operating income and 490% in pre-tax profit against the same period last year, the lesson is you don’t need to own the media channels to do well.
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/ 11 November 2003
Afrox Healthcare CEO Michael Flemming minced no words in telling shareholders how the company derived its growing profits in the year to end-September. Medical inflation, he told Moneyweb, was responsible: the company charged about 10% more than the year before, while 5% was organic growth. Pat Sidley explains why a free-for-all in medical-aid rates is the ‘primrose path of dalliance’.
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/ 11 November 2003
South African Airways’s (SAA) appointment of a new management team last week brings to a close a year of turbulence marked by the departure of key staff. The national carrier had been set on a stable foot-ing in readiness for international competition and eventual privatisation, said SAA’s CEO and president André Viljoen.
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/ 11 November 2003
A black economic empowerment (BEE) charter for the R14-billion wine industry is expected only after the February/March harvest, but an investigation into land transfers and funding for the initiative is already under way. Only 1% of the multibillion-rand business, concentrated in the Western Cape, lies in black hands.
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/ 11 November 2003
It has been a bad couple of years for Spin Doctors. As a political species they are on the endangered list, cut down to size pretty much everywhere you look around the world. They have often been architects of their own misfortune — the demise of Tony Blair’s right-hand communicator, Alastair Campbell, being the prime example. In South Africa, thankfully, they soldier on.
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/ 11 November 2003
The shooting down of a Chinook helicopter — the warhorse in the United States’s operations in Iraq — the weekend before last highlighted the threat of the sizeable quantities of missiles in the country falling into the hands of opposition groups using guerrilla tactics.
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/ 11 November 2003
While it has become something of a ritual for the festive season to coincide with Springbok coach culling season, there is good reason to believe that despite all evidence to the contrary Rudolf Straeuli will still be national coach when the new international season starts in June next year.