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/ 14 November 2007
The Equality Court on Wednesday ordered a Durban landlord with a ”whites only” policy to pay a woman R10 000 in compensation and scrap his discriminatory policy. The court declared the offending clause in the lease agreement unconstitutional and invalid.
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/ 14 November 2007
Far away in West Africa, adventurer Kingsley Holgate and his expedition have been muddling through the mud and humidity of West Africa fighting a battle against malaria, handing out mosquito nets to pregnant mothers and young children. At the same time, schoolchildren in South Africa have been drawing pictures to illustrate his expedition.
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/ 14 November 2007
Deputy Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has undertaken to repay his department R1 020 on Thursday for flowers he sent to his wife. When the issue arose and was brought to his attention in the middle of this year, he had immediately stated his intention to pay back the money, he said on Wednesday.
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/ 14 November 2007
Load shedding was stopped temporarily on Wednesday afternoon but was likely to restart towards evening, said Eskom. A number of Eskom’s power station units were still on unplanned outages and were having equipment repaired. An Eskom spokesperson said load shedding could continue for the next five to seven years. ”Demand and supply are very tight.”
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/ 14 November 2007
The strike at the 2010 stadium in Durban will not affect the preliminary draw of the Soccer World Cup, local organising committee CEO Danny Jordaan said on Wednesday. Workers at the stadium went on strike last week demanding better wages and monthly project bonuses of R1 500. The draw will determine the playing groups for the World Cup in South Africa.
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/ 14 November 2007
A decade of healthy growth in Africa has put the continent on track to tackle its high poverty levels, the World Bank said on Wednesday, releasing its 2007 Africa Development Indicators. ”After years of stop-and-start results, many African economies appear to be growing at the fast and steady rates,” the report says.
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/ 14 November 2007
Computer-related crime is one of the fastest-growing forms of crime worldwide, the security head of a Centurion-based information and communications technology company said on Wednesday. In 2005, white-collar crime in South Africa was reported by Business against Crime as running in excess of R40-billion a year.
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/ 14 November 2007
The death toll from Tuesday’s accident involving a truck crammed with farmworkers has risen to eight. The news came as the Western Cape government vowed to crack down on the way farmworkers are transported. The accident happened in the Boland, when the truck, reportedly carrying about 70 farmworkers, overturned.
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/ 14 November 2007
South Africa’s retail sales growth slowed to 2% year-on-year in September at constant prices, data showed, but analysts said this was likely not enough to hold off another interest rate hike in December. Retail sales growth slowed from a downwardly revised 6,6% in August, Statistics South Africa said on Wednesday.
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/ 14 November 2007
South Africans can soon expect a vast improvement in the time it takes to obtain identity documents, passports and a range of other services, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula announced on Wednesday. Also, a loophole allowing illegals to acquire South African documents and grants fraudulently will be closed.
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/ 14 November 2007
The ongoing strike that has seen construction workers down tools at Durban’s Moses Mabhida Stadium could spread to other 2010 Soccer World Cup stadiums that are under construction, as well as the high-speed Gautrain. Meanwhile, about 600 striking construction workers marched to Durban’s City Hall on Wednesday.
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/ 14 November 2007
African investors on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for the construction of Seacom’s undersea broadband cable. The additional bandwidth provided by the cable, which will cost $650-million and cover more than 15 000km, will also be a catalyst for productivity.
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/ 14 November 2007
Tiger Consumer Brands, which owns Albany Bread, did not profit from the fixing of the price of bread, the company said on Tuesday. "The company did not benefit from the price-fixing. I don’t know who did, but we did not," said spokesperson Jimmy Manyi.
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/ 14 November 2007
Authorities are working "round the clock" to establish what caused an outbreak of diarrhoea in Delmas, the Mpumalanga health department said on Wednesday — though the Treatment Action Campaign in the province has accused the department of covering up the cause of the outbreak.
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/ 14 November 2007
The JSE was higher at midday on Wednesday as positive local results extended its gains from the morning session. In the morning, the JSE had opened stronger on Wall Street’s overnight rally, which created positive sentiment for overseas markets. By noon, the JSE’s all-share index had climbed 1,09%.
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/ 14 November 2007
An alleged assassination plot by the African National Congress (ANC) against the man behind the hoax email saga, Muziwendoda Kunene, is a ”completely conjured up story”, the ruling party said on Wednesday. The party was responding to a 702 report in which Kunene claimed that there was a plot to assassinate him.
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/ 14 November 2007
"We are much better off in the long run by trusting each other," says Jimmy Wales, founder of free-for-all internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. He was speaking on Tuesday in Johannesburg at the inaugural session of the Innovation Series — an endeavour presented by iCommons, ITWeb, Mindshift and the <i>Mail & Guardian Online</i>.
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/ 14 November 2007
Gold Fields, the world’s fourth ranked gold producer, said on Wednesday it had closed the Four Shaft Complex of its Beatrix mine after two miners were killed during a clash. Gold Fields said three other miners were seriously injured when violence erupted between rival factions of the National Union of Mineworkers.
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/ 14 November 2007
Lock Victor Matfield has withdrawn from South Africa’s squad for the one-off Test with Wales on November 24, becoming the 12th member of the World Cup-winning squad to miss the tour. The South African Rugby Union (Saru) announced he had been released due to personal commitments.
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/ 14 November 2007
All HIV vaccine trials in South Africa have been put on hold following the failure of the Phambili trial. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on Wednesday invited researchers who worked on the Phambili study to her office in Pretoria to explain the reasons why the vaccine trial was stopped.
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/ 14 November 2007
IT specialist Muziwendoda Kunene — one of the men allegedly behind the hoax email saga — was shot in Pretoria on Wednesday. The incident comes after Kunene claimed that senior members of the African National Congress were plotting to assassinate him. The party dismissed his claims as a ”conjured-up story”.
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/ 14 November 2007
Hitachi and Alstom have been awarded the R20-billion boiler and the R13-billion turbine contracts respectively for Eskom’s Medupi power station at Lephalale in the Limpopo Province. ”Medupi will be the biggest dry-cooled power station in the world,” said Brian Dames, managing director of Eskom’s Enterprises Division.
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/ 14 November 2007
Material suspected to be human bones have been unearthed at a home in Capital Park, next door to the home of paedophile Gert van Rooyen, Pretoria police said on Wednesday. Captain Percy Morokane said the owners of the home were installing a swimming pool when the discovery was made on Tuesday evening.
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/ 14 November 2007
The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Tito Mboweni, gave a very strong signal that another interest hike is on the way when he told members of Parliament that in his opinion, rates should go up. The bank staff’s forecast for inflation in the coming months shows inflation increasing above the 6% target for part of 2008.
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/ 14 November 2007
Confirmation that the Soccer World Cup has arrived on the shores of Africa is little more than a week away. The reality for many in the soccer fraternity will only sink in when they watch the preliminary draw beaming out from Durban’s International Convention Centre to television screens across the world.
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/ 14 November 2007
Slain musician Taliep Petersen described his marriage to Najwa as a ”nightmare” the Wynberg Regional Court in Cape Town heard on Tuesday. Taliep’s sister Tagmieda Johnson took the stand after the lunch break, at Najwa’s second bail application before Western Cape Regional Court president Robert Henney.
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/ 13 November 2007
South African consumers are expected to spend 12% more this holiday season, while Europeans might spend less to absorb food and energy price increases, the annual Deloitte year-end holiday survey said on Tuesday. Spokesperson Rodger George SA consumers still remained more optimistic about their economy than all the other countries surveyed.
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/ 13 November 2007
Pretoria High Court Judge Nkola Motata was given another chance on Tuesday to try and block a lower court from hearing recordings of his alleged drunken diatribe after a car accident. This was after Nkola’s drunken-driving trial was postponed in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s court until July 2 2008.
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/ 13 November 2007
An apartheid-era Cabinet minister and a former ambassador to the United States, Piet Koornhof, died in his home town of Stellenbosch on Monday afternoon. He was 82. Koornhof’s son Johan said on Tuesday afternoon that his father had been a ”passionate” man who had a ”great gusto for life”.
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/ 13 November 2007
A seven-year old boy, who was beheaded in an alleged muti transaction, also had his testicles removed, the Pinetown Magistrate’s Court heard on Tuesday. This emerged at the first appearance of Lizwi Gwiqisa, Bandile Msiki and building contractor Petros Gwosebenn, who are charged with murder and contravening the Human Tissue Act.
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/ 13 November 2007
A new group chief executive officer has been appointed at Alexander Forbes after the resignation of Peter Moyo, the company said on Tuesday. Bruce Campbell — previously chairperson of the company — has been appointed as group CEO. Moyo apparently left the company because of differences with the board.
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/ 13 November 2007
There is a personnel shortage of more than 50% at the intensive care unit (ICU) at the Helen Joseph Hospital, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Tuesday. ”The Gauteng Health Department claims that the ICU ‘works optimally’, but I don’t see how this can be the case with a 54% vacancy rate,” said Bloom.