After four years in the wilderness, Damien Hirst, the hooligan genius of the art world, is back Gordon Burn Four years ago, for his last major show, at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Damien Hirst made a piece featuring a giant beach ball bobbling on a column of air. The ball was multicoloured and […]
Neil Thomas TAKING STOCK Sentiment is a strange thing. When warm and positive it can inspire people to great heights. When negative, it can easily result in doubt and destruction. It’s also hard to measure, at least in any rational way. That’s what makes it so difficult to try and second-guess the international investment community’s […]
Bill Elliott GOLF The blazered battalions of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (R&A) of St Andrews will be defrocked for this year’s Open in July. In a remarkably forward-thinking move for the conservative R&A, the famous blazers will be dispensed with for on- course officials and replaced by … windcheaters. For the first Open […]
Steven Friedman WORM’S EYE VIEW We can learn from events across our borders: but do we? An aspect of Zimbabwe’s trauma which has received less notice than it should is what it tells us about our own hang-ups. If citizens’ responses in radio phone- ins or letters to the press are a guide, that of […]
Donna Block President Robert Mugabe’s government is now targeting top Zimbabwean businesspeople who are independent of the ruling Zanu-PF party as land invasions and violence against farmers and opposition supporters continue. The head of Zimbabwe’s third-largest company, Strive Masiyiwa, is now pondering his future surrounded by bodyguards in London after being warned by sympathetic security […]
ZIMBABWE’s foreign payment arrears have climbed to at least $350-million dollars, raising the prospect of a default on its external debt and further fuel shortages, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. It said the deficit relates to payments for goods already dispatched to Zimbabwe and for orders not yet sent. Citing bankers it added that […]
Mary Dover South African hotel giant Southern Sun has secured a site for a new hotel in Tanzania as part of the group’s aggressive expansion into Africa. Southern Sun recently purchased the Lusaka Holiday Inn from the owners of the property, Anglo American, and a new hotel is under construction in Maputo, Mozambique. The 159-room […]
Eight years ago a group of businesspeople hired a whale crier and forever changed the state of tourism in Hermanus Andrew McUtchen When Pieter Claasen first lifted a horn- shaped strand of kelp from the sand, and sounded a resonant bass note to the cliffs of Grotto beach, his audience could hardly have been more […]
A legal battle over a genetically modified rodent is putting the lucrative mutant mouse industry under the microscope James Meek In October a jury in San Francisco will make a decision in one of the new millennium’s most bizarre and complex court cases. Teams of elite lawyers will have spent weeks studying and arguing over […]
Thebe Mabanga IN YOUR EAR The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) is an interesting figure in South African broadcasting. It was established in 1993 to regulate the broadcasting industry and has made considerable, but sometimes jittery, strides in fulfilling its duties. One of its successes is the deregulation of the airwaves, with radio now reaching an […]