David Shapshak The first time I heard daiko (Japanese drums) was at a performance by a group of Kobe elementary school children performing their school’s songs. It sounded like a full-blown adult symphony, not a bunch of 12-year-olds taking turns at the drums because there weren’t enough to go around. Such is the power of […]

Donna Block : Share World For the past few weeks, my four-year-old son, an addict of British satellite television stations, has been driving me crazy, jumping off the sofa and the walls singing a jingle from a United Kingdom toy advert. In a loud, off-key voice he proclaims over and over how, “It’s a great […]

Mungo Soggot and Sechaba ka ‘Nkosi The public protector tried to shield the disgraced rector of Vaal Technikon, who was fired after a commission of inquiry found him guilty of financial impropriety and abusing his position. The technikon’s council ousted Professor Aubrey Mokadi and attached several of his assets this week despite a threat from […]

Charlene Smith General Andrew Masondo, an African National Congress political commissar in Angola in the 1980s, this week apologised to the brother of the man whose execution he ordered in 1981. Masondo and Mzwai Piliso, the ANC head of security at that time, have widely been held responsible for letting conditions in Angolan camps get […]

Mail & Guardian reporter The Human Rights Commission (HRC) has thrown out a complaint of subliminal racism laid against the Mail & Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers by the Association of Black Accountants and the Black Lawyers Association. The request for an investigation was turned down “because the issue of racism in the media is […]

The David Gleason Column Is the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) on the verge of becoming more like a First World bourse than one which has the characteristics of an emerging market? Well, it looks that way to me – and, I might add, to more than a handful of investors and analysts. Here is what […]

John Naughton There is a saying in the computer business that “only the paranoid survive”. The man who has taken it most to heart is Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The pace of change in the computing industry is such that if you blink you might not spot the threat. Gates blinked spectacularly in 1994, when Netscape […]

Wally Mbhele The former head of the security police, General Krappies Engelbrecht, may be charged for his alleged role in tampering with evidence relating to the plane crash that killed former Mozambican president Samora Machel. Machel and 24 others died on October 19 1986 when their plane crashed near Mbuzini in Komatipoort. Engelbrecht and a […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 9.30am. SOUTH Africa’s amateur golfers on Wednesday thrashed neighbouring Zimbabwe 11-1/2 to 3-1/2 in their golf Test over the Modderfontein course. Both teams fly to Chile on Thursday to compete in the world team championships for the Eisenhower Trophy in Santiago. The South Africans went into the second day with […]

CLAUDE KAMANGA MUTOND, Kinshasa | Wednesday 12.40pm. PEOPLE suspected of economic crimes such as hiking prices in the Democratic Republic of Congo will now be court-martialled and sentenced to death if found guilty, the DRC government announced. Counterfeiting money, hiking prices and setting arbitrary foreign exchange rates are now considered “high treason” in the DRC, […]