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/ 25 November 2005
Kirby’s colonial project Robert Kirby writes that Shakespeare’s plays and poetry ”stand on their own, immune from any historical context” (June 9). Really? How was he able to achieve this feat? Surely any writing is influenced by, and rooted in, contemporary public discourse and the prevailing mores of its time. It stands to reason that […]
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/ 25 November 2005
DA is getting stronger In her analysis of the 2006 local election results (March 3), Vicki Robinson reached the premature conclusion that support for the Democratic Alliance had dropped and that the DA had once again failed to make inroads in the townships. A proper post-election analysis shows that the opposite is true: in 2006, […]
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/ 25 November 2005
All faiths used violence Pope Benedict, in trying to argue that religion should not be spread by force, failed to say that the Catholic Church, indeed Christianity, has been guilty of this. Strife between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the use of force to maintain orthodoxies by the rack, burning and warfare, are an unedifying history. […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Kasrils a man of honour I am not a supporter of any political party, but I believe your readers should know what kind of man Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils is and will continue to be. I met Kasrils when he was deputy minister of defence. As part of his VIP detail, I was his personal […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Campus racism insidious Auditors Deloitte have found that there is no racism at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s medical school (July 7), only “small incidents, which appear to be nothing more substantial than personal differences, or wrong perceptions, or misunderstandings …” Case closed, let’s get on with it! The problem here is one of perspective, because […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Come down, Peter Mokaba! Forgive me, commander Peter Mokaba, for not speaking to you before. We have been preoccupied with managing hypocrisy and mediocrity in the organisation you died for. Commander, the youth league of Anton Lembede is burning — particularly in the province of your birth, Limpopo — and we need fire extinguishers. The […]
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/ 25 November 2005
When Sir Francis Drake hove into view of the south-western appendix of our great land, hyperbole was inevitable. No doubt ankle-deep in Elizabethan upchuck, his britches starched by pig fat and a robust bout of dysentery, his bodkin cruelly ravaged by months of salty air and now nothing more than a rusty tool dangling between his thighs, he was primed for rhetorical excess.
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/ 23 November 2005
A campaign to stop controversial German vitamin entrepreneur Matthias Rath from conducting ”illegal” HIV trials in South Africa will be stepped up, three organisations said on Wednesday. ”He has got to be stopped,” Congress of South African Trade Unions president Willie Madisha said.
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/ 23 November 2005
Eight of South Africa’s nine provinces are being been severely affected by drought, the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs said on Wednesday. Hardest hit are northern parts of KwaZulu-Natal, said the department’s senior manager of drought and risk management, Ikalafeng Kgakgatsi.
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/ 22 November 2005
Both the media and the Western Cape Directorate for Public Prosecutions got a lashing in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on Monday — the media for sensational coverage of the shoplifting case against the son of Cape Town mayor Normaindia Mfeketo, and the directorate for incompetence.
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/ 18 November 2005
The unemployment rate for youths aged between 16 and 25 is 52% in South Africa, while in the Western Cape it is 49%, compared with a national average for all ages of 26,5%, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel said on Thursday evening in Cape Town. "A large chunk of the answer to unemployment lies in upgrading the available skills," he said.
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/ 16 November 2005
A power failure that blacked out large areas of Cape Town on Wednesday left MPs attending a National Assembly debate in the dark when Parliament’s back-up generators failed to kick in. Areas affected by the cut included the Cape Town city centre and the towns of Caledon, Hermanus, Kleinmond, Bredasdorp and Cape Agulhas.
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/ 16 November 2005
Health-services provider Network Healthcare Holdings (Netcare) on Wednesday reported a 34,4% rise in fully diluted headline earnings per share to 58,6 cents per share for the year ended September 30 2005, from 43,6 cents a year ago. The group declared a final capital distribution of 15 cents per share.
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/ 14 November 2005
Increased interaction of warders with prisoners is important in pre-empting gang attacks and other gang-related activity in prisons, a study released on Monday reveals. The Department of Correctional Services is looking at issues such as staffing levels and the provision of equipment at a representative 36 prisons around the country.
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/ 14 November 2005
Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, who was admitted to Cape Town’s Gatesville Medical Centre last week after a heart attack, was transferred to Two Military Hospital on Sunday. Earlier on Sunday, ANC Western Cape chairperson James Ngculu said Lekota was in high spirits when an ANC delegation visited him at the Gatesville Medical Centre.
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/ 11 November 2005
The African National Congress government seems paranoid about disaffected minorities staging a counter-revolution, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Friday. ”The president seems to think that foreign-funded non-governmental organisations are out to undermine the government,” Leon said.
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/ 10 November 2005
Tensions in the tripartite alliance in the Western Cape have flared anew with a stinging rebuke in a letter published in the Cape Times on Thursday to Congress of South African Trade Unions provincial secretary Tony Ehrenreich by the chairperson of the African National Congress in the province, James Ngculu.
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/ 9 November 2005
The African National Congress in the Western Cape has disciplined a member who fired shots in the air at a chaotic branch meeting in September, and accepted his protestations of loyalty to the provincial leadership. A disciplinary committee has sentenced Douglas Ndawonde to expulsion, but suspended the punishment for one year.
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/ 8 November 2005
South Africans should use water sparingly due to the drought in many parts of the country, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Buyelwa Sonjica said on Tuesday. Indications from the South African Weather Service are that prospects for above-normal rainfall this season are not good.
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/ 8 November 2005
Luke Woodham’s self-described ”first kill” was his pet dog, Sparkle; a year later, in 1998, he murdered his mother and two schoolmates in Mississippi at age 17. Woodham was not the first serial killer to target animals and, since the 1970s, research by criminologists has found links between violence against humans and cruelty to animals.
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/ 8 November 2005
Entrepreneurial activity among most black South Africans is motivated by necessity and hampered by historical disadvantages. Black micro-businesses are most usually a case of one woman battling to survive. Or, when they are larger, they face a higher failure rate than would a white, Indian or coloured SMME because the entrepreneurs lack skills, experience or networks.
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/ 7 November 2005
Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and Western Cape Congress of South African Trade Unions regional secretary Tony Ehrenreich have taken each other on over the demands of the modern South African state — and how best to run the economy — in a new magazine, <i>Mindshift</i>.
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/ 4 November 2005
Treatment Action Campaign members demonstrated outside the office of the Medicines Control Council in Pretoria on Friday, calling on it to act on the ”illegal” clinical trials conducted by Mathias Rath. Vitamin entrepreneur Rath and his foundation have been involved in a legal battle with the TAC.
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/ 3 November 2005
Although fires raging through South Africa are being brought under control, the Working on Fire programme warned on Thursday morning that fire danger has increased in three provinces. It said that in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Gauteng the ”high orange” on the fire-danger rating index has risen to red.
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/ 3 November 2005
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has threatened to take legal action against vitamin entrepreneur Matthias Rath within days if the authorities do not move to halt his activities. The Rath Foundation advocates its vitamin products as a treatment for HIV/Aids. It claims anti-retrovirals are toxic.
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/ 3 November 2005
The Humansdorp fire department was still frantically answering telephone calls on Wednesday evening as blazes ran rampant through the southern part of the Eastern Cape. A spokesperson said the N2 highway, which was closed to traffic earlier on Wednesday and had vehicles backed up for kilometres, had been reopened.
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/ 2 November 2005
Large parts of the Eastern Cape are being evacuated in the path of runaway fires, the Working on Fire programme said on Wednesday morning. ”A fire is burning along the N2 highway towards Port Elizabeth near the Van Stadens River bridge,” spokesperson Evelyn Holtzhausen said. ”The fire is out of control.”
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/ 2 November 2005
A woman whose nose was bitten off by a seal on Sunday, will undergo reconstructive surgery on Thursday. ”I’m feeling alright,” Elsie van Tonder said on Tuesday from her bed in Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town. ”The doctors are going to reconstruct my nose on Thursday.”
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/ 2 November 2005
A number of fires in the Humansdorp area of the Eastern Cape were extinguished by 8.15pm on Tuesday, fire-department official Andrew Pietersen said. ”The Jeffrey’s Bay fire and the St Francis fire have been extinguished,” he said. Earlier, he said fires were ”jumping from one place to another”.
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/ 1 November 2005
A fire in the Humansdorp area of the Eastern Cape and three fires in the Tsitsikamma area were out of control on Monday night, Working on Fire (WOF) said. ”They are burning commercial timber and indigenous veld,” WOF spokesperson Val Charlton said at 7.30pm. Gale-force winds expected on Tuesday would fan the flames.
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/ 1 November 2005
When foreign Muslims, including from some conservative Muslim countries, visit South Africa, they are usually stunned that there are so many mosques with no women’s facilities. That some mosques do have women’s facilities does not placate them. And when visiting some mosques that accommodate women, they become despondent to see torn carpets in tiny rooms that pass off as ”women’s sections”.
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/ 28 October 2005
”There is total disregard for the well-being and safety of our people [in Khayelitsha] who are being used as guinea pigs,” declared Smuts Ngonyama, head of the presidency in the African National Congress. No, Ngonyama was not speaking about the activities of the Rath Foundation, which has been undermining the government’s HIV/Aids treatment programme.