Howard Barrell spoke to a Cape Town cosmologist who believes there will always be a limit to what science can do In terms of the age and extent of the universe, the passing of the millennium that many of us are marking with such fervour, fear or superstition is an irrelevance, according to George Ellis, […]

Guy Willoughby Comedy, drama, car chases, derring-do … at this crazed end-of- decade/century/millennium/world party season, the Cape has it all, although mostly offstage. Other managements are desperate to compete with our town’s longest-running entertainment – the South African police’s extraordinary efforts to help, or hinder, the seasonal killjoy bombers. Here’s a shortlist of the goodies […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, East London | Thursday 5.00pm. THE touring England cricket team are studying videotapes of Lance Klusener in a bid to devise a method of coping with the South African’s batting prowess. Duncan Fletcher, the England coach, said before the start of the third test in Durban on Sunday that the tourists have caught […]

1 Jomo Sono 2 Richard Branson 3 Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin 4 The Shah of Iran and the King of Albania 5 South 6 Enigma 7 De Voortrekkers, in 1916 8 Lech Walesa 9 Macao 10 Chris Patten 11 The Watergate 12 Luciano Pavorotti, Jos Carreras and Placido Domingo 13 Emily Hobhouse 14 General Fulgencio Batista […]

TONY LEON: Democratic Party (official opposition) NATIONAL ASSEMBLY SEATS: 38 Grade: B- His Tonyness was hardly likely in Parliament to be able to match his performance in the election, and he has not. This is in part a price of success. Increasing your party’s National Assembly representation fivefold in a single election takes energy – […]

shook the world “Search in your past for what is good and beautiful. Build your future from there.” – Paul Kruger, 1902 “The only white race that has steadily been going backwards to barbarism.” – Sir Garnet Wolseley comments on the Boers during the Anglo-Boer South African War “E=mc2” (Energy equals mass times the speed […]

Shaun de Waal The books that most profoundly shaped the thought of this century were written before it began – Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Each in its way was at the epicentre of a movement that rippled out […]

SPORADIC heavy gunfire was heard before dawn on Wednesday on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Sierra Leonean Information Minister Julius Spencer said the strikes were a “pre-emptive” measure by troops of the Nigerian-led Ecomog intervention force. “Everything is under control and there is no danger to the capital,” Spencer said in a local radio […]

Paul Kirk, Nalisha Kalideen, Fiona Macleod, Marianne Merten and Connie Selebogo spoke to the parents of five children born this year ‘I want her to have all the choices she wants,” says 24-year-old Waleed Ajouhaar, a young father from gang- ridden Manenberg on the Cape Flats. His daughter, Aiesha, was born on November 19 and […]

The United Nations marked the 1990s as a decade for natural disaster reduction, but 1999 has been one of the worst on record. Tim Radford reports Here is how to become a disaster statistic. Move to a shanty town on an unstable hillside near a tropical coast. Crowd together as more and more people arrive. […]