Andrew Worsdale Pick of the week `This is the richest and most powerful nation of all and so it is the most hated … this country is at war 24-hours a day.” So says Jon Voight in his role as chief of the United States’s national security agency in Tony Scott’s exhilarating paranoid thriller, Enemy […]

The appointment of Ramesh Vassen as consul general to Delhi could well be a turning point in the way our government handles corruption. Here we have a man with a criminal conviction – confirmed by the highest court in the land – a man who stole money, a man who was expelled from his own […]

THE KwaZulu-Natal provincial government may soon retrench redundant employees, Finance MEC Peter Miller said on Thursday. Miller said at a press conference that national government will soon release guidelines for retrenchments and severance packages. A process of job evaluation will begin in all departments to determine who gets the chop. About 83% of the 1998/99 […]

AMANDA Coetzer beat defending champion and top-seeded Lindsay Davenport of the United States 2-6 6-4 6-3 on Friday in the Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo. The upset sees the seventh seeded South African advancing to the semi-finals — along with Australian Open champion Martina Hingis, who defeated Steffi Graf of Germany 3-6 6-2 6-4. […]

Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH When Aids began to take its appalling toll on humankind, we were all scared as hell of it, of course. We listened with rapt attention to what the scientists had to say, for if anyone was going to save us from it, it was the scientists who had discovered […]

A friend with zero tolerance of nonsense points out that not a shred of credible evidence has yet been produced to support the view that a group of militant Muslims is responsible for the spate of evidently politically motivated bomb attacks in the Western Cape. He is right. The only support comes from inference drawn […]

Chiara Carter A Cape Town bus company employee is asking the Labour Court to find that he has been paid less than a white colleague because he is black – a case which, if successful, is likely to set a precedent for challenging discrimination in the workplace. Michael Louw, a buyer for Golden Arrow Bus […]

Karlin Lillington If you have a task to do, find someone to share the work and you get the job done in half the time. That’s the idea behind Distributed.net, a group that co- ordinates spare computer processor power from across the Internet to solve huge mathematical tasks which otherwise would take days, weeks, and […]

Patrick Smith Former South African president FW de Klerk presided over a Cabinet meeting in March 1993 that gave Cape businessman Vito Palazzolo a residence permit, although at the time he was the subject of an Italian extradition warrant. The respected magazine Africa Confidential will report this week that in September 1993, De Klerk’s government […]

FERIAL HAFFAJEE TAKING STOCK Lazarus Madiseng proffered the fruit of democracy. A prickly pear, it is sweet and juicy. The assignment: to find out about the life of ordinary South Africans since 1994, when change came to this land. They don’t come a lot more ordinary than Madiseng – a kindly grandfather who after a […]