THE president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has “surprised” bank officials by winning Z$100000 in a promotional draw carried out by Zimbank for its clients. Zimbabwe Banking Corporation (Zimbank) said Mugabe’s name emerged from the promotional draw on Wednesday out of thousands of qualifying account holders who participated in the promotion. “Master of ceremonies Fallot Chawawa […]

Neil Manthorp Cricket Boardroom back-stabbings and committee politics are as much a part of sport as scrotal rash and bad feet, so while the country’s “thinking sports fan” ponders whether Hansie Cronje’s team is distracted by the forced resignation of United Cricket Board (UCB) president Ray White, Cronje’s men are “just playing cricket”. Wednesday’s remarkable […]

Is the death of the NSO the symptom of a deeper malaise in South Africa: the demise of arts and culture? Belinda Beresford reports The death rattle of the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) began with the triumphant blast of the national anthem at the start of the second-last performance the orchestra is ever to give. […]

Ivor Powell It was one of those acts of Sod, the unavoidable pitfalls of journalistic deadlines: the day that everything changed in South Africa fell on a Friday, the day of the then Weekly Mail’s publication. So we had to wait another week before The Weekly Mail could respond to the drama that unfolded as […]

Stefaans Brmmer The Mmakau villagers first knew there was trouble 18 months ago when the baboons came down from the hills. Little could they have known that the primates were harbingers of a saga that would split the community and draw in controversial granite magnate Fred Keeley, relatives of Minister of Public Enterprises Jeff Radebe […]

Channel vision Last week I was harping on about how television delivers up its little shock tactics. Some crafty incubus waits until the audience is deep in mindless acceptance mode, then slips in a dart so sharp as to horrify. Last Saturday this happened in the middle of an SABC3 news bulletin. The effect was […]

Lucretia Stewart Body Language `Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” was Professor Higgins’s bewildered complaint in My Fair Lady, as Eliza Doolittle led him a merry dance. How times have changed. Now men want to be more like women, sometimes even to be women. Failing that, the question today seems to be: […]

SPORT and Recreation Minister Ngconde Balfour wants greyhound racing legalised. Briefing the national Assembly’s sport and recreation committee on Tuesday, Balfour said greyhound racing is legal in most developed countries. He asked the committee to start investigating the possibility of legalising the sport. Balfour said his office had received a flood of correspondance on the […]

Gregory Mthembu-Salter United Nations Security Council members are currently adding the finishing touches to a resolution on the deployment of a UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This follows a request for troops from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and an impassioned appeal for assistance from African heads of state and government representatives, […]

Brenda Atkinson Mixed Media A couple of months ago, an excitable tide of telltale rippled through the Johannesburg ad industry. Mike Schalit, creative director at Net#work and outgoing chair of the Creative Directors’ Forum (CDF), had called upon all CDF affiliated agencies to take up the cudgels for creativity in this country by toppling John […]