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/ 10 September 2004
For more than a week after the closing ceremony in Athens the Olympic party was still going strong in China. Celebrations for the country’s record-breaking medal haul were in full swing, with athletes singing karaoke on triumphant TV specials, political leaders proclaiming a new era of national self-confidence and companies lining up for endorsements from a new generation of national heroes.
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/ 10 September 2004
‘Ons glimlag tussen ons trane deur [We smile amid our tears]”. These were the words of Johann Naudé, eldest son of Beyers and Ilse Naudé, who announced the death of his father early on Tuesday morning. ”Oom Bey” made a huge contribution to the birth of democracy. He paid a high price for his uncompromising courage.
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/ 10 September 2004
Curbing excessive spending through strict controls and redirecting funds to social services and poverty alleviation schemes are the centrepiece of Malawi’s efforts to woo donors into supporting its 2004/05 budget. Malawi’s Minister of Finance, Goodall Gondwe, unveiled an 85,6-billion kwacha budget in Lilongwe with a warning to government departments that they adhere to his new expenditure control measures.
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/ 10 September 2004
The love affair between Nollywood — the Nigerian film industry — and Zambian television viewers began in 2003 when the Zambia National Broadcasting Cooperation began airing the soap opera, Super Story. The first instalment won such a devoted viewership that it opened the floodgates for pirated tapes to enter the Zambian market. And with piracy came the darker vice of pornography.
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/ 10 September 2004
The political economist Thomas Malthus caused a stir in 1798 when he published his controversial work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus postulated that unrestrained population growth will result in the increased production of food beyond the capacity of the Earth’s resources to sustain and this, in time, will lead to scarcity. Saliem Fakir agrees: the lifestyles of the fat and famous could spell the failure of civilisation.
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/ 10 September 2004
Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the epoch-shaping onslaught on New York and Washington but a string of other al-Qaeda attacks since 1998 has left little mark on our consciousness. What has terrorism done to the lives of ordinary people from Casablanca to Karachi? Reporters asked nine people living in the shadow of the bombers.
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/ 10 September 2004
The bloody denouement to the Beslan tragedy was barbaric: no other word will suffice. There could never be any justification for terrorists who, we are told, shot fleeing hostages in the back — nor for those who died at the hands of the ill-judged Spetsnaz operation. Beslan was barbaric — but so has been Russia’s reign of terror in Chechnya.
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/ 10 September 2004
Cricketing Anglophobes have been struggling to disguise smiles of smug vindication this week. Indeed, even for those without an axe to grind it does seem extraordinary that the English press, having been handed a baking summer of spectacular victories, comic-book heroes and now a mini-World Cup, should be as lugubrious as it is.
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/ 10 September 2004
The South African women’s national soccer team, Banyana Banyana, are aiming to win the fourth African Women’s championship, but with inept preparations, a coach that will not be at their opening game and a national body that does not take women’s soccer seriously, there is little chance of the side being crowned queens of Africa.
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/ 10 September 2004
As soon as she walks into the room, it seems ridiculously easy to look up and say ”Oh, hi Delia” as if she’s just popped over for a coffee and a natter about football and a new recipe. I’m tempted, before we get down to the nitty-gritty of deciding whether her beloved Norwich City appear doomed after a mere four games in the Premiership, to offer up Marco Pierre White’s elegant fricassee of sea scallops with ginger and an inky sauce nero as a culinary equivalent of Arsenal.