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/ 21 October 2005
Johannesburg attorney Barry Aaron, it might be said, is the perfect gentleman. He doesn’t kill journalists. Reporters without Borders records that, worldwide, 51 journalists have been slain in the course of their duties this year. If another three are dead by December 31, it will be the bloodiest year in a decade.
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/ 21 October 2005
Nolitha Fakude’s career is about to acquire a new dimension of influence. She has served two-thirds of a three-year term as the first female president of the Black Management Forum. At the beginning of this month, she took up her position as executive director for human resources and strategy at chemical giant Sasol.
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/ 21 October 2005
There was a brief 10 days this year when BP ran the show at the Department of Minerals and Energy, until Sasol once again took over. An observer at the Competition Tribunal hearing into the proposed Sasol/Engen merger could easily have come to this conclusion after hearing how lawyers for British Petroleum (BP) had drafted the department’s original application as an intervention against the merger.
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/ 21 October 2005
One of the most depressing events of the political week was the photograph of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez embracing Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe under the sneering headline "Brothers in arms". Chavez — a genuine anti-imperialist leader with a genuinely popular programme and genuine popular support — deserved the sideswipe.
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/ 21 October 2005
In the week South African cyberspace was given an area code (O87), the country’s first report on wireless broadband offerings was released and the cheapest asymmetric digital subscriber line connection was announced. The suffix 087 was allocated for Voice over Internet Protocol numbers by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa.
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/ 21 October 2005
Those who watch <i>Top Billing</i> are not, as a rule, exposed to disturbing concepts like multi-lingualism. Indeed, generations of selective breeding and some ferociously opportunist and cheekily genocidal shenanigans by Great Granddaddy on the Reef in the 1880s have combined to form a protective cocoon around them, keeping at bay the horror of the middle-class world.
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/ 21 October 2005
Recently, some editorials in South Africa’s national newspapers have degenerated to unprecedented levels of poor taste. Take, for example, that awful line written in the Sunday Times editorial in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Brett Kebble that read: ” … may no one like you be born again”.
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/ 21 October 2005
Dubbed the ”babies in bags” scandal, the discovery of 15 foetuses last year near a river in Nairobi horrified Kenya — and drew government assurances that illegal abortions would be brought to a halt. A pregnancy can only be terminated in the East African country if it puts a woman’s life in danger.
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/ 21 October 2005
South Africans should be quivering at evidence that desert trees are “marching” south to escape the heat, a scientist told a landmark national conference on climate change recently. Quiver trees, used for generations by the San to make quivers for their arrows, are shifting towards the South Pole in response to rising temperatures.
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/ 21 October 2005
What would Jesus blog? This was among the questions considered by a conference of God bloggers in California recently, which heralded their growing numbers as potentially the most important development in the spread of Christianity since the Gutenberg printing press began churning out bibles in the 15th century.