Riaan Wolmarans
Guest Author
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/ 17 December 2007

ANC hopes to start voting on Monday

The African National Congress’s Polokwane conference may deal with nominations for the party’s presidency late on Monday, according to a senior party official. The nomination process is expected to result in a head-to-head clash for the top post between party president Thabo Mbeki and his deputy, Jacob Zuma.

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/ 17 December 2007

‘This conference is different’

Delegates to the ANC’s national conference in Polokwane were on Sunday concerned about disruptions, but also hopeful that the party will emerge stronger and better. Motsotose Ndyalivani (49), a delegate from the Rogersfontein region of Grahamstown, said the conference was different from the six that he had attended in the past.

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/ 28 November 2007

The ANC’s tower of Babel

A constitutional crisis. Instability. Business as usual. Disillusionment. The jury was out on South Africa’s immediate political future at the Mail & Guardian‘s Critical Thinking Forum held in Johannesburg on Tuesday evening. Will the African National Congress’s Polokwane conference bring popular change or business as usual?

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/ 14 November 2007

What has Jimmy Wales been up to?

"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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/ 6 November 2007

Fantasy reviews

The end of the world didn’t bother Michael Stipe much, but three authors beg to differ. In new novels by Max Brooks, Garth Nix and Sarah Hall, the apocalypse — or a close facsimile thereof — has come and gone, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces.

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/ 25 October 2007

Theatre icon Patrick Mynhardt dies

South African theatre icon Patrick Mynhardt, famous for portraying the Herman Charles Bosman character Oom Schalk Lourens on stage, has died at the age of 75, it was announced on Thursday. Mynhardt passed away of natural causes in London where he was performing his biographical one-man show Boy from Bethulie.

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/ 5 October 2007

Are you on Facebook?

Hillary Clinton, United States presidential candidate, was raised in a middle-class family in the middle of America — a classic suburban childhood, she says on her page on Facebook, the social networking website that has taken the world by storm. She was warmly welcomed in Oakland this week, where a crowd of 14 000 heard her speak. That’s about one-third of the number of supporters linked to her Facebook profile.