Five is now six in Europe’s premier rugby championship, and it’s not before time, writes Eddie Butler It’s all very new millennium, this expansion to Six Nations. But it has to be said: it’s about bloody time. By now we should be up to at least Seven. If Romania had been offered the hand of […]

Howard Barrel OVER A BARREL Madam Speaker, Honourable Members – South Africans. New circumstances require new approaches. Ten years ago this week, in this House of Assembly, at this podium from which I now address you on the ”state of the nation”, our then benighted country was launched into a new era. The man who […]

Lionel Abrahams LIVING IN HOPE AND HISTORY: NOTES FROM OUR CENTURY by Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury) This is a gathering of Nadine Gordimer’s essays: reflections, reviews, tributes, conference papers, reports, letters and addresses to the United Nations, the Nobel Prize audience and other eminent bodies – the earliest from 1959 but most from the Eighties and […]

MARK GLEESON, Kumasi | Friday 6.50pm. BAFANA Bafana defender Mark Fish and his teammates are relishing the prospect of playing in front of a hostile capacity home crowd against co-hosts Ghana in Sunday’s African Nations Cup quarter-final. ”There’s nothing better than to play against a full crowd that is against us,” said the England-based defender […]

THREE policemen charged with using unnecessary force against ”People’s Poet” Mzwakhe Mbuli were acquitted during a disciplinary hearing last week. Mbuli claimed the three Lyttelton policemen assaulted and insulted him in January last year when they came to fetch him from the Pretoria Regional Court, where he was being tried for armed robbery. The policemen […]

TEN years to the day after he announced Nelson Mandela would be freed from prison and the African National Congress and other organisations opposing apartheid would be unbanned, F W de Klerk is a happy man. “I look back and I say: ‘No regrets,’” he said on Wednesday in an interview with Cape Talk radio […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday 9.00pm. SOUTH Africa’s cricketers start the long climb to the final of the triangular limited-overs international series anew when they face a hyped England in East London. The Proteas’ two-wicket defeat on Wednesday to Zimbabwe at Kingsmead has seen them toppled from the top of the log, and they […]

THE Organisation of African Unity has decided to impose travel and financial restrictions on leaders of the Anjouanese separatist movement in the Comoros islands. The sanctions are a bid to force the separatists to commit to negotiations on the future of the break-away island, according to a statement issued by OAU Secretary General Salim Ahmed […]

AN Eastern Cape farmer has been diagnosed with the deadly and contagious Congo Fever. An intensive program has been launched in the province to prevent the spread of the disease. The farmer, Francois Retief, 51, is in a critical condition and is being treated in strict isolation. He was initially admitted to hospital at Graaff-Reinet […]

EASTERN Cape doctor Costa Gazi has been fined R1000 for criticising former health minister Nkosazana Zuma over the government’s refusal to issue the anti-AIDS drug AZT to infected pregnant women. The health department disciplinary committee in the Eastern Cape also warned Gazi of “serious action” should he repeat the criticism. Gazi told an East London-based […]