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/ 21 September 2007
<b>ON CIRCUIT:</b> Colour-blind drag queens and a rat who thinks he can cook
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/ 21 September 2007
Take one historic event, add a famous political activist and make it on to the Booker Prize shortlist. Mohsin Hamid speaks to Decca Aitkenhead about his second novel.
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/ 21 September 2007
Remembering the activist at the Apartheid Museum: Emilia Potenza reports.
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/ 21 September 2007
The British government stands accused of breaking its G8 pledge to help defeat Aids after it revealed it would only marginally increase its contribution to the Global Fund for Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis.
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/ 20 September 2007
There is an apparent endemic propensity and tendency on the part of all government ministers and other officials either to ignore court orders or treat them with a lack of enthusiasm and respect.
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/ 20 September 2007
The rhetoric against media freedom is shooting through society. In the establishment the ante has been upped by President Thabo Mbeki and his political associates, Ronald Suresh Roberts and Christine Qunta, all of whom have conducted a sustained verbal assault on the media in the past three months.
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/ 20 September 2007
I have lost count of the number of unwinnable debates I have held in the past few years with friends who are media ideologues. The essence of the discussion has been the same. It is that: "Rapule, we know you; you were a comrade but, unfortunately, you work for the capitalist media and he who pays the piper calls the tune."
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/ 19 September 2007
South Africa’s advertising watchdog rejected complaints on Wednesday over a commercial showing a secretary spitting into her boss’s coffee, saying she cleared her throat too loudly for it to be taken seriously. The advert by a chain of florists for Secretaries Day earlier this month showed a woman noisily clearing phlegm from her throat before spitting it into a cup of coffee.
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/ 19 September 2007
The female condom has failed to take off in Kenya, depriving women of one of the few means over which they have control of protecting themselves.
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/ 18 September 2007
South African President Thabo Mbeki and his Mozambican counterpart Armando Guebuza reached agreement Tuesday on moves aimed at increasing access and levels of trade across their common border. In a briefing to reporters after the meeting in Pretoria, senior ministers said the main crossing between the neighbours would soon undergo a major revamp.
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/ 18 September 2007
South African Airways (SAA) is to increase capacity on more than half its routes in Africa as part of a bid to reverse its flagging fortunes, the national carrier announced on Tuesday. General commercial manager Rushj Lehutso said SAA would either increase the number of flights or the size of its aircraft serving 11 of its 19 African destinations.
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/ 18 September 2007
Punk legends the Sex Pistols announced on Tuesday that they will stage a one-off gig in November to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their controversial album <i>Never Mind the Bollocks</i>. The band, who spearheaded the 1970s punk movement in England with singles like <i>Anarchy in the UK</i> and <i>Pretty Vacant</i>, will play London’s Brixton Academy on November 8.
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/ 18 September 2007
China, the world’s fastest-growing aviation market, will need 3 400 new airplanes worth about $340-billion over the next 20 years, United States aircraft maker Boeing said on Tuesday. The forecast marks a dramatic increase from an earlier prediction by Boeing of 2 900 aircraft in the period from 2005 to 2025.
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/ 18 September 2007
MP3 players/recorders detect some respiratory sounds better than traditional stethoscopes and could prove handy replacements in the future, two researchers told an international conference on respiratory diseases. By pressing a microphone directly to the chest, the researchers were able to record a whole range of respiratory sounds with different patterns.
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/ 18 September 2007
Swami Parthasarathy, who founded the Vedanta Academy in Maharashtra State, India, offers students a three-year full-time residential course on Vedanta, a system of Hindu philosophy. The swami has also designed programmes for the corporate sector that offer a balance between outer success and inner peace.
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/ 18 September 2007
It was one of the sneakiest sleights of hand ever manoeuvred by the former minister of education. No, it was not in the contrivance of the mergers. Nor, can you believe it, was it in the creation of universities of technology with the hilarious proviso that they continue to function solely as technikons; a rose by any other name.
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/ 17 September 2007
A friend commented the other day about the tendency of my writing to be about black people or what is known as the black experience. The easy answer, clichéd as it might sound, is that we write best when we write about what we know best. We internalise those things that matter and have the greatest effect and discard what does not.
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/ 17 September 2007
Venice Mayor Massimo Cacciari wants to step up his war on pigeons, going so far as to outlaw wedding parties from throwing the traditional handful of rice at newlyweds, Italian media reported on Monday. The daily <i>La Repubblica</i> said the draft ordinance would prohibit the throwing of rice outside the Palazzo Cavalli wedding hall.
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/ 17 September 2007
At a checkpoint leading on to the airport highway in west Baghdad this week, a policeman blocked the traffic. Dressed in a blue-checked uniform, Kevlar helmet, a Kalashnikov slung on his shoulder and a whistle in his hand, the last button of his uniform was missing, exposing a hairy stomach that hung over his military belt.
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/ 16 September 2007
South African police traded gunfire with angry crowds on Sunday as they arrested 180 suspects in two operations in a crackdown on crime including murder and drug-trafficking, state-run media said. Police returned fire after they were shot at from a crowd of onlookers during an operation in which 25 people were arrested for public violence at Mankweng in Limpopo, it was reported.
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/ 16 September 2007
Colin McRae, who died in a tragic helicopter crash alongside his five-year-old son Johnny on September 15, was born with his foot firmly on the accelerator. Rallying, and indeed daredevil pursuits, was in the blood for McRae, who was born in Lanark in southern Scotland on August 5 1968. His father Jimmy was a five-time British rally champion. His brother Alister is also former champion.
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/ 16 September 2007
A Thai passenger jet with 128 people on board crashed on Sunday while coming in for landing in bad weather on the resort island of Phuket, police and officials said. At least 39 people were killed, Thailand’s Deputy Transport Minister said. "Thirty-nine dead bodies were found. About 50 injured were sent to hospital," the minister, Sansern Wongcha-um, told reporters.
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/ 16 September 2007
Kate and Gerry McCann, who are formal suspects over the disappearance of their daughter, Madeleine, in Portugal, launched a new publicity campaign in Europe to help the search for the girl. Friends of the couple also sought on Sunday to shift the focus back on to the search for the British toddler and away from speculation about the parents.
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/ 16 September 2007
A woman threw herself into battle with a giant snake after it tried to strangle her pet dog to death, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Sunday. Catherine Leonard was walking in a country park when the 4,5m-long Burmese python attacked her beloved Poppy.
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/ 14 September 2007
New York oil prices fell on Friday on profit-taking after striking a fresh record peak above $80 a barrel overnight on concerns over tight supplies of United States crude, dealers said. New York’s main futures contract, light sweet crude for delivery in October dropped 57 cents to $79,52 per barrel.
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/ 14 September 2007
<b>ON CIRCUIT:</b> The good guys are rather down-at-heel in <i>Night Watch</i> and movies showing at the North West film festival
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/ 14 September 2007
Nigerian troops on Friday raided a community in the restive Niger Delta in a bid to dislodge armed gangs who have been terrorising the local population there, a military spokesperson said. The operation "began at 10am [local time]. The objective is to hunt down the militants from the creeks," Major Musa Sagir said.
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/ 14 September 2007
At least fifty-six people have died while trying to make the perilous Gulf of Aden crossing from Somalia to Yemen, the United Nations refugee agency said on Friday. A UN spokesperson told journalists that a dozen boats carrying 925 Somalis, Ethiopians and others fleeing growing violence and insecurity in the region had arrived in Yemen since September 3.
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/ 14 September 2007
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin park their jet just a stone’s throw from their offices, paying $1,3-million a year for rights at a federally maintained airfield, the <i>New York Times</i> reported Thursday. Why put up with bothersome local traffic when you can shell out a princely sum for take-off and landing rights just a few minutes from your office?
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/ 14 September 2007
Campaigners for the English language on Thursday attacked a growing tendency for "obvious" public information posters, such as a police sign urging people: "Don’t Commit Crime." Other examples highlighted by the Plain English Campaign include "Warning: Platform ends here" on the end of rail station platforms, and "May cause drowsiness" on sleeping pills.
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/ 14 September 2007
Last week, as the United States commemorated the 2 600 people who died in New York on September 11 2001, CNN surveyed US public attitudes to President George Bush’s "war on terror". It found that two-thirds of Americans believe the US is not winning, and more than half believe terrorists will find a way to attack no matter what the US government does.
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/ 14 September 2007
Eskom’s attempts to get co- generation agreements off the ground might be hampered by low electricity prices. Co-generation is the term for electricity that is produced as a co-product of an industrial process. And, even if new capacity is added to the grid, it will be comparatively small. The prospect of the world’s cheapest electricity is dangled before investors, even as the same low prices deter those who would potentially invest in new generating capacity.