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/ 17 November 2006
From Madonna’s <i>English Roses</i> to Gloria Estefan’s Noelle’s <i>Treasure Tale</i>, Ed Pilkington brings out the best and worst of celebrity books for kids.
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/ 17 November 2006
Britney, Tiger, Gandalf and Madonna will soon join the more usual Peters and Janes in Britain’s playgrounds, while Harry Potter may also drop in, according to a new survey of babies’ names. Other newly fashionable choices include Snoop, after the United States rap star, who may end up hanging out with Reebok and Adidas.
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/ 17 November 2006
Environment ministers ground their way towards the end of a 12-day climate summit on Friday, squabbling over a blueprint for negotiating the next round of carbon pollution curbs under the United Nations’s Kyoto Protocol. The talks gathered members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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/ 17 November 2006
The budding South African film industry should draw from the country’s own rich and painful experience of the apartheid era and not try to emulate Hollywood’s big-budget movies, veteran actor Morgan Freeman said on Thursday as he appeared at Cape Town’s Sithengi film festival.
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/ 17 November 2006
Japan on Friday declared its bid to host the 2015 Rugby World Cup and bring the event to Asia for the first time, after learning lessons from its narrow defeat to New Zealand for the 2011 contest. ”We decided because of the enthusiastic support at home and overseas,” said Japan Rugby Football Union president Yoshiro Mori.
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/ 17 November 2006
The ruling African National Congress has an ”amazing self-belief” that because it demands a majority among the electorate, it has a divine right to do ”what it wants, when it likes”, official opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon charged on Friday in his regular internet column.
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/ 17 November 2006
South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu expressed concern on Friday that Jean-Pierre Bemba’s decision to reject the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) election results could spark more violence. ”You have to be crazy not to worry,” Tutu told reporters in Brussels, ahead of a debate on good governance in Africa.
Herculean, the first single from the yet-to-be-named group featuring Fela Kuti’s former drummer Tony Allen, Damon Albarn (Blur/Gorillaz), Paul Simonon (The Clash) and Simon Tong (The Verve), is an Orwellian take on the general state of the world, using a reimagined, post-apocalyptic West London as its muse. The song, complete with pained imagery of dark […]
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/ 17 November 2006
Although there is a long way to go in creating a fully non-discriminatory and prosperous society, progress is being made and South Africans must embrace the challenges ahead with confidence, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday. Expecting to eradicate a deeply entrenched 350-year-old legacy of poverty, inequality and underdevelopment in a very short time was entirely unrealistic.
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/ 17 November 2006
Someone once told me that Aimé Césaire’s <i>Return to My Native Land</i> (<i>Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in its original French</i>) only saw the light of day when a casual passer-by discovered the tattered leaves of an original manuscript under a pile of books in a second-hand shop, or, alternatively, among a bunch of news and other papers destined to wrap up someone’s takeaway dinner in a fish and chip shop in a southern French port city sometime in the 1950s.