JEREMY LOVELL, Cape Town | Friday A CONFIDENTIAL defence department report has painted a grim picture of decrepit machinery and shortages of ammunition and fuel in South Africa’s armed forces – even as the country sets out to spend R30bn rand on ships and aircraft from Europe. The report says a lack of funds means […]
SOUTH African information technology group Dimension Data’s US division has entered a deal to deliver fully managed Web hosting to businesses in the northeast of the United States jointly with BandwidthCenter. BandwidthCenter Strategic Planning Vice President Pamela Mercanti said the deal was worth around $250m to Didata over the next 18 months. She said this […]
GOLD Fields chairman and chief executive Chris Thompson is to meet with the South African government in a bid to resurrect the failed merger with Canada’s Franco-Nevada Mining Corp. Gold Fields and Canada’s Franco-Nevada stunned the mining world in June when they unveiled a $3.7bn all-stock deal to create the world’s third-largest gold producer with […]
PROSPECTOR Mount Grace Resources NL has agreed with South Africa’s Mintek to build a pilot plant for producing magnesium in Australia’s Northern Territory. Mount Grace is to pay Mintek, South Africa’s government-backed minerals research group, up to A$2m to help fund construction of a 1.5 megawatt plant and for a licence to use Mintek’s continuous […]
THE man in charge of organising all-party talks in war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, former Botswanan president Sir Ketumile Masire, has expressed increasing pessimism about his chances of success, saying the international community was not doing enough to support him. Congolese President Laurent Kabila refuses to work with Masire, who is now looking for […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]