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 […]

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 […]

ED STODDARD, Sasolburg | Friday BLACK protesters and police have clashed outside a Sasolburg court after a magistrate remanded a white man accused of dragging a black employee to his death behind a truck for psychiatric tests in a secret hearing. Businessman Pieter Odendaal, 44, had been scheduled to appear before a Sasolburg court this […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT and REUTERS, Paros, Greece | Thursday AT least six South Africans are known to have survived the Greek ferry disaster near the Aegean Sea island of Paros, in which the death toll has risen to 62 as rescuers continue to pull bodies from the water. They are Charlene Cooper, Louis van Wyk, Pieter […]