Barry Streek Despite pending gun control legislation, more than one million applications for firearm licences have been approved in the democratic South Africa, “but the rate of stolen” firearms is lower this year than the previous two years. This was revealed by Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete when he replied to a question […]

EGYPTIAN President Hosni Mubarak has been given a clean bill of health after undergoing a series of medical tests on his ear at a Paris military hospital, an Egyptian newspaper reported Thursday. “The tests confirmed he is fine,” the pro-government Al-Ahram newspaper said. Mubarak, who is due back in Cairo later Thursday, held talks with […]

Mail & Guardian reporter What is an Internet company worth? The spiralling values of Net stocks now make it a quasi-scientific question. And two Salomon Smith Barney analysts are just the latest to attempt an answer. London-based Gerard van Hamel Platerink and Morten Andersen have recently completed a detailed note on the subject which provides […]

Shaun Harris TAKING STOCK Small investors’ nerves are getting frayed, it seems, as we approach the end of the year. That was the clear message to come out of the last unit trust quarterly results, which showed a strong move out of equity funds into low-risk money market funds, or out of the unit trust […]

Ivor Powell A SECOND LOOK As fighting flares up again in the war- torn Democratic Republic of Congo, and international diplomats engage in ever more frantic efforts to patch up the Lusaka ceasefire agreement, the question increasingly being asked is whether there actually was any ceasefire in the first place. Speaking in Uganda this week, […]

Heather Hogan Police are investigating a charge of arson after St Peter’s church in Hermanus was vandalised in the early hours of the morning on Halloween. Reverend Dan Auret believes if he hadn’t arrived when he had, the church, the oldest in the town, would have burned to the ground. He is unsure whether the […]

Bill Gates’s embattled Microsoft was highly praised on Thursday by none other than former president Nelson Mandela.

Donna Block SHARE WORLD I’ve come to the conclusion that having kids drives you a bit mad. I realized this when a friend in New York called to tell me that Nasdaq, the United States’s electronic share trading exchange, is going to set up shop in Europe and wants to create a strategy for 24-hour […]

A CONTINGENT of 10 Malawian soldiersleft for the Zambian capital of Lusaka on Wednesday to begintraining forpeace-keeping duties inKinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Astatement fromthe Malawian army headquarters in Lilongwe said the Malawian contingent was part of an Organisation of African Unity (OAU) peace-keeping initiative. Army spokesmen stressed thatthe Malawian soldiers were merely […]

Justin Pearce ‘It was eight months ago the police took him away,” Maryam recalls. “First they take the husband to starve the wife.” Maryam (47) and her husband are Eritreans who had spent all of their adult lives in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. They were part of a community of thousands who, during the […]