Shaun Harris TAKING STOCK Well, it seems the niceties are over. Despite what Nedcor says about a “friendly” merger, its bid for control of Standard Bank Investment Corporation (Stanbic) has effectively turned hostile. Up to now, this has been the stuff of boardroom drama, a clash of banking titans that makes good copy in the […]

Heather Hogan Leandro de Beer, a security officer in Potchefstroom, arrested three armed robbers by tricking them into thinking he was a police dog. The employee of Mooi Rivier Protection was patrolling the area when he spotted three men attempting to break into a shop. He shouted at them and they fled. De Beer chased […]

A JOHANNESBURG man who allegedly killed his wife and hid her body in a freezer for more than two weeks at their home will be arrested as soon as he has recovered from a self-inflicted stab wound. The suspect stabbed himself in the throat when police arrived at his house to question him in connection […]

David Robbins The Higher Education Amendment Bill, which allows the minister of education to appoint administrators in the place of vice- chancellors at badly run universities, was passed this week by the National Assembly and is due to go to the National Council of Provinces for consideration. Educationists speculate that once it’s enacted, the vice-chancellors […]

Minister of Education Kader Asmal tells David Robbins why he believes tertiary education is going through a malaise, not a crisis ‘I’m going to shock you,” says Minister of Education Kader Asmal, “by saying that I don’t think there’s a crisis in South Africa’s third-level education sector. It’s certainly not in a state of terminal […]

Howard Barrell India was the country largely responsible for quashing Commonwealth plans at last weekend’s summit in Durban to step up monitoring of member states’ human rights records. Strongly supported by Malaysia, India led resistance at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) to recommendations that the 54-nation grouping increase its ability to act against […]

US writer and composer Paul Bowles died early Thursday at a hospital in Tangiers of cardiac arrest, medical sources said. He was 88. Bowles, who would have turned 89 next month, was hospitalized in Tangiers, where he made his home in northern Morocco, after falling into a coma because of a cardio-respiratory crisis. Bowles, a […]

David Robbins All public universities and technikons are partially funded by the state via a formula which calculates individual institutional funding according to a set of established criteria. In a tertiary sector in considerable flux, a deal of dissatisfaction has been expressed about the formula currently in use. There’s also talk of using a modified […]

Peter Dickson The Eastern Cape government’s sorry saga of in-house corruption and “creative bookkeeping” amid a legacy of poverty and neglect has been the butt of post- apartheid political satire for much of the last five years. This week, for the first time since 1994 and amid growing public outrage and open scorn at Bisho’s […]

REFEREE Falla Ndoye of Senegal and assistant referee Ali Tomusange of Uganda will represent Africa at the first world club championships from January 5-14 in Brazil, the organisers said on Wednesday. Corinthians and Vasco da Gama of Brazil, Manchester United of England, Real Madrid of Spain, Al-Nasr of Saudi Arabia, Nexaca of Mexico, South Melbourne […]