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 […]
Barry Streek At least 1,5-million African people fled their homes during the first eight months of this year – an average of 50 000 new refugees every week – because of war, violence and political repression, says the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR). At least 10 African countries suffered significant population flight between January […]
Stewart Hennessey Body Language >From Samuel Richardson’s instructive novel for young women, Clarissa (1747), to What a Young Woman Ought to Know (hot in the early 1900s), to the modern dating bible, The Rules, all the oh-so-earnest advice being dispensed to young women can be distilled into one dull command: don’t put out. This is […]
Andy Colquhoun Harry Viljoen is set to irrevocably change the face of South African rugby when he becomes Springbok coach in Cape Town today. Viljoen is likely to announce that he will be taking 10 black players in the 40-strong Springbok squad for the four-Test end-of- season tour to Argentina, Ireland, Wales and England. And […]
President tells party caucus that Western interests are seeking to discredit him and South Africa Howard Barrell President Thabo Mbeki believes the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is part of a conspiracy to promote the view that HIV causes Aids. Mbeki also thinks that the CIA is working covertly alongside the big US pharmaceutical […]
Mail & Guardian reporter A virus thousands of times narrower than a human hair has been shown to have an armoured coat organised like the chain mail of medieval knights. It probably protects the DNA of bacteriophage hk97, a virus that affects only bacteria, just as chain mail deflected arrows while allowing movement. Researchers report […]
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 […]