David Shapshak and Joyce Barrett The Cape Town Olympic bid team knew an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member was “available to the highest bidder”, but it did not make use of this information to influence the bid. Caught up in the biggest corruption scandal of the IOC’s 105-year history, disgraced Swaziland IOC member David Sibandze […]

Germaine Greer:SITE SEEING I’m not impressed with the general availability of books online. I’m glad a United Kingdom edition of Amazon’s online bookshop was launched because it was infuriating not being able to buy books from UK distributors on the United States site. But I find this site slow. Virtually all its titles are available […]

George Hazeldon believes his proposed self-sufficient community will solve South Africa’s crime problem … for some. Chris McGreal went behind the electric fence George Hazeldon likens his vision to Mont St Michel, the ancient French monastery and fortress. Detractors dismiss the British property developer’s scheme as a fool’s paradise. Either way, the contracts are rolling […]

ANGOLA called on Thursday for the United Nations to publish results of its enquiry into the June plane crash which killed UN envoy Alioune Blondin Beye. Beye spent the last two years of his life mediating in Angola’s peace process between the Luanda government and Unita rebels. He was killed last June when the light […]

Mungo Soggot:A SECOND LOOK In a letter to the Mail & Guardian last week, Willie Hofmeyr, African National Congress MP responded to an editorial, entitled “Ban guns, build jails, fire Sydney”, which discussed the lamentable state of law and order in South Africa. Hofmeyr hit back by cataloguing the creation of “drastic anti-crime laws”, the […]

Mark Tran in New York John Meriwether, the head of stricken hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, recently accused big Wall Street firms of preying on his company when it lost millions last year, in the hope of buying up his firm on the cheap. He was speaking in public for the first time since […]

TWO elephants were shot dead in a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare on Wednesday, national radio reported. National Parks rangers killed the jumbos after they injured a man when they wandered into the Bluff Hill suburb, which is surrounded by farmland. The death of the elephants is certain to cause an outcry from conservationists, who […]

Making just one of the millions of proteins we manufacture every day involves copying the recipe from DNA, ferrying the building block to a kind of biological knitting machine, threading the blocks into a chain, folding the chain into complex shapes and finally adding various chemical identity tags. At every stage, things can go wrong. […]

DEPUTY President Thabo Mbeki on Thursday officially launched a revised government website from the State Theatre in Pretoria, saying it will help government communications. It carries legislation, records of parliamentary proceedings, speeches, press releases and background on members of the government, national and provincial. Most of it works.

bloodshed Chris McGreal The KwaZulu-Natal town of Richmond is bracing itself for another bout of bloodshed this weekend with the funerals of assassinated United Democratic Movement secretary general and warlord Sifiso Nkabinde and those killed in a revenge attack on an African National Congress family attending a funeral vigil. Nkabinde’s right-hand man and probable successor […]