Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH In India, they called him “Marshall Law”. And with good reason. In a Test match at Kanpur in 1983, he took four wickets in each innings. And made 92 with the bat in an innings. An Indian cricket fan vividly remembers the two newspaper headlines that described the event […]

Howard Barrell The Commonwealth Summit in Durban is being dominated by a confidential internal report saying the organisation should increase its powers to act against member states for human rights abuses. The document would pave the way for action against the governments of countries like Cameroon, Kenya and Zimbabwe if they did not improve their […]

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 […]

John Matshikiza WITH THE LID OFF ‘Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say,” the late John Lennon once jingled on the subject of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. This week we had the pleasure of Her Majesty’s company in our humble country for the second time in five years. Last […]

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 […]

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 […]