Anna Tack Nothing is for free, or so the trusim goes. But in these days of high-tech toys like music samplers and computer scanners seamlessly colonising everyone else’s ideas through a superimposition here or a misrepresentation there, the question of who owns what has assumed paramount importance worldwide. And on the cyber highway the issue […]
Julian Drew: Athletics Like a javelin out of nowhere is how Marius Corbett arrived on top of the victory rostrum at the World Athletics Championships in Athens last week. The forgotten man of South African athletics, who improved considerably earlier this year to rank 14th in the world going into the championships, he added nearly […]
Nick Cumming-Bruce in Bangkok The skyscrapers on Bangkok’s skyline, once a sign of Thailand’s place at the centre of Asia’s boom, are now conspicuous symbols of a shocking and, for investors, unnerving bust. Typical is the prestige office block overlooking the manicured surroundings of the Bangkok sports club but abandoned, half-built, by a now penniless […]
Janet Smith SABC radio and broadcasting and entertainment industry leader, Primedia, have done a fair swop of Jeremy Thorpe and Chris Gibbons, two of South Africa’s strongest newsmen. Thorpe, a former TV news chief executive producer who left the SABC this year after an internal battle over the decision to end the wire services of […]
The discovery of a 117 000-year-old set of footprints on the dunes near Langebaan once again places Africa at the centre of the evolution of man. If palaeo- anthropologist Lee Berger’s hypothesis is correct, these prints were left by the earliest humans, whose first home may have been the Western Cape. They were small feet. […]
The horrific murder of a child at the hands of his peers has seen a community grappling to come to terms with itself. Gaye Davis reports The people of the working-class Cape Flats suburb of Factreton are no strangers to death and violence. Turf wars between two local gangs, the Americans and the Casbahs, have […]
Mungo Soggot The Legal Aid Board has revoked its controversial funding of Allan Boesak’s defence after it emerged that he has other financial backing, drummed up by South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Franklin Sonn. The decision to withdraw Boesak’s funding was taken at a board meeting on Monday on the grounds that the […]
All the elements of theatre, comic and tragic, attended this week’s Hani amnesty hearing, writes Swapna Prabhakaran Clive Derby-Lewis does not look like a man who has been in prison for four years. At his amnesty application in Pretoria this week, he looked like a man who has been sleeping comfortably and he spoke like […]
In the early days of South African music, many stars sold their rights to record companies for a flat fee. Today they say they were exploited and are looking for compensation. Glynis O’Hara investigates A recent visit to South Africa by The Manhattan Brothers’ Joe Mogotsi has brought an old music industry issue to the […]
Government has reduced tariffs over a wide range of goods without considering the broader consequences for industry, writes Charles Millward In January 1943, a commentator in The Times of London noted: “Next to war, unemployment has been the most widespread, the most insidious, and the most corroding malady of our generation: it is the specific […]