Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane The South African Universities Vice- Chancellors Association (Sauvca) this week rejected the heart of the Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) recent recommendations for restructuring tertiary education. The core of the recommendations are that all institutions be re-arranged to create what Sauvca refers to as “a three-tier system”, one that it […]

Rory Carroll and agencies The captain and three crew members of a Greek ferry that sank killing at least 65 people have been charged with multiple counts of murder. Investigators were focusing on reports that the Express Samina, carrying more than 500 passengers, was apparently on automatic pilot minutes before it hit a well-marked rocky […]

Andrea Meeson Mzwandile Zuma has been a farmworker much of his adult life on land near Gingingdlovu, northwest of Stanger. Zuma has planted, weeded and harvested cane on sugar estates and private farms all over KwaZulu-Natal. His hands – calloused, cut and stained blacker than his sunburnt skin – are testament to more than a […]

Barry Streek South Africa’s tougher new gun control regime is rapidly taking shape in Parliament in Cape Town. Prospective gun- owners will have to be older than in the past, demonstrate that they are competent to have a firearm and will hold a licence for a fixed period only, rather than for life. It seems […]

The art of inefficient building in South Africa is by no means restricted to low- cost housing. Like clothes and cars, the design of modern South African buildings is only partly to provide utility – it’s also important to signal the status and fine taste of their owners. In doing so they have lost a […]

REUTERS, London | Friday BRITISH chocolate makers are to investigate reports of widespread child slave labour on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast and insist they will take action if such “abhorrent practices” are discovered. Ivorian cocoa producers and international cocoa traders say a British television documentary exaggerates how West African children have been lured into […]

Adam Evans I was having a quiet drink with an old friend the other day when he told me, very proudly, that he had just finished his first novel. This was completely out of character – he had never displayed any interest in writing before – and, with mounting amazement, I asked him what it […]

The dream was of a personal jet-pack and not just for the high flyer. However this blue skies technology never took off David Hambling This 21st century is not what it was cracked up to be. It is not that I actually wanted to live in a gleaming glass skyscraper attended by robot butlers, and […]

A quality of South Africans is that we believe the world is ours for the taking. Not for us the business of playing percentages. There’s nothing of the effete English cricketer in us. No, if there is a game to be played or a race to be run, we know that we can win it. […]

Mike Berger A SECOND LOOK The issues of race and racism in our public life seem inescapable. Yet ordinary South Africans manifest an amazing ability to relate to one another as members of the same human family; often much more so than would be suggested from the content of the media. Nevertheless, it is clear […]