David Le Page african frontiers It’s all about detective work, says one of the astronomers involved in the building of the Southern African Large Telescope (Salt). As they labour on a Karoo mountain top building Salt over the next five years, South Africa’s intergalactic Hercule Poirots know they are essentially building a great big magnifying […]
A recent article has highlighted how Aids statistics can be manipulated by dissidents to prove their point of view Belinda Beresford There are damned lies. There are statistics. And then there is noseweek. That venerable organ of expos’s and investigative journalism has itself been used in a malicious distortion of facts to advance the arguments […]
The explosion of Israeli-Palestinian violence over the past few days is, in the strange manner of such negotiations, a product of the fact that a final peace agreement is tantalisingly close and thus at its most vulnerable point. The two sides have been grappling over “final status” issues; the signs are there that they were […]
Jaspreet Kindra A deal to allow traditional authorities to function as parallel local councils was being hammered out this week in an effort to break the deadlock between traditional leaders and the government threatening to postpone the local government elections. The discussion of the plan suggests the African National Congress has backed down from its […]
Transformation of the media in the new South Africa has become a controversial topic Sean Jacobs Under apartheid, white South Africans enjoyed a racialised “public sphere” that excluded black people. Political media and news were geared to whites and media content largely reflected the skewed balance of power relations in society at that time. The […]
Iden Wetherell When Zimbabwe concluded its bloody election campaign in June the country heaved a sigh of relief as a return to normality beckoned. With more than 30 dead and thousands beaten and displaced in the ruling Zanu-PF party’s campaign of rural terror, it was hoped the country would at last find some peace. That […]
Before you can conquer new territory, you need to know where you are going Leon Forde Creating an accurate map of infinite, abstract cyberspace is not the easiest task for cartographers. Cyberspace, of course, does not exist. It is, to paraphrase novelist William Gibson, a consensual hallucination of space and surface – our brains perceive […]
Mail & Guardian reporters A former South African army colonel accused by the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, of supplying weapons to rebels in Sierra Leone has written to the US envoy vigorously denying the claims. The former South African Defence Force (SADF) officer, Fred Rindel, has told Holbrooke that the […]
Piers Pigou Apartheid assassin Ferdi Barnard’s revelations before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) amnesty committee this week about destabilisation before the 1994 election have again raised questions about the extent of security force participation in the Boipatong massacre. Barnard claimed that hitmen provided guns to Zulu hostel dwellers to carry out a series of […]
innovations You know what you want. So just asking for it could be a lot simpler than having to go out, scour an auction website like ebay.com and then bid on it. M-Web has introduced an interesting twist on the now-familiar auction site in the form of iWant. You post your desire and sellers then […]