OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday 6.30pm THE Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that the Liquor Bill, passed by Parliament in November 1998, is unconstitutional. This comes after then president Nelson Mandela referred the Bill to the Concourt with questions over its constitutionality. Mandela said he had reservations about the constitutionality of the Bill as […]

Barry Streek South Africa’s 739 unelected traditional leaders are being paid nearly R600- million a year in salaries – at an average of R65 071,84 a month or R780 853,68 a year. This was revealed by Minister for Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi in reply to a question tabled in the National Assembly by […]

Justin Pearce travelled to the Ethiopian province of Tigray, a hot spot in the country’s border conflict with Eritrea The colonel sits in a cabin lined with plastic grain sacks (“net contents 100kg”) and decorated with paintings of the Ethiopian kings who kept the Italians at bay in the 19th century. “The moment our sovereignity […]

Marianne Merten A Khayelitsha shebeen owner says he has no option but to run an illegal operation because apartheid legislation forced drinking in townships underground. The shebeen owner has applied to the Cape High Court for the return of his liquor worth R130 000. Last month police from Khayelitsha and Operation Good Hope seized alcohol […]

Ebrahim Harvey CROSSFIRE Let us say that the African renaissance is not a grand diversion from the serious post-apartheid problems that the African National Congress-led government faces, as some argue, and that it is a genuine attempt to resolve the deepening crisis in Africa. Because of this crisis – of which we are a part […]

Stephen Gray Review of the week Although the last grim episode in the life of the “Breaker” takes place during the mopping up operations of that Anglo- Boer South African War of atrocities, we locals have never become as steamed up about it as his fellow Australians. When the Breaker Morant stageplay of 1979 was […]

AN outbreak of Lassa fever in eastern Sierra Leone has killed at least 80 people, while about 100 more are in an extremely serious condition in Segbwema Town, a doctor said. Dr Ibrahim Turay said: “The outbreak has been prevalent for some 10 months now since we took over Segbwema,” 255km east of Freetown. He […]

Channel vision Now that the recent surfeit of rugby is behind us, perhaps it is time to reflect on the surfeit of television advertising that accompanied it. And surfeit, overabundance, glut it most certainly was. If nothing else the coverage of the Rugby World Cup once again emphasised the urgent necessity for a strict rewriting […]

Will a virtual currency, transferred over the Internet, make hard cash redundant? Charlotte Denny investigates He is the darling of Wall Street, credited with engineering America’s longest post-war economic expansion. But the man who holds the future of the world economy in his hands, Alan Greenspan, the head of the United States Federal Reserve, is […]

South African second-hand traders are cleaning up their act, writes Rowan Callahan There are many similarities between the current second-hand goods market and the used-car market of old. A few years ago there were thousands of small used-car dealers all over the place offering “low mileage, one-owner bargains” out of dingy premises. What people got […]