Howard Barrell A group of leading South African scientists is putting together a R50- million project to develop a vaccine to fight what Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and others have called the country’s gravest threat, the HIV/Aids epidemic. The scientists believe South Africa has a window of opportunity in which to develop a vaccine which […]

Alex Duval Smith The smouldering remains of Lesotho, a kingdom raped of its constitutional integrity after South Africa’s heavy-handed military intervention, lie as visible proof of the post-apartheid government’s disastrous foreign policy. Political analysts believe that it is chiefly South Africa’s failure, since elections in 1994, to invent a credible role for itself in Africa […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kimberly | Friday, 8.00pm. GRIQUAS showed a sensational first-half score run in which they scored six tries, and then went on to notch up a definite 64-7 win over Mpumalanga Pumas in their Bankfin Currie Cup rugby match at the Absa Park stadium on Friday. Griquas led 36-0 at halftime. It was man […]

Howard Barrell Over a Barrel We South Africans may have scored something of a first this week in the annals of foreign policy-making. We may well be the only country ever to complete what appears to be a full-scale somersault in foreign policy and to invade a neighbouring state while our president, deputy president, foreign […]

Sarah Boseley A revolutionary device that will tell a doctor what is wrong and which drugs to prescribe from the smell of the patient’s breath is being developed by a team of top scientists at one of Britain’s leading universities. Development of the diagnostic breathalyser is being compared to the invention of the thermometer. Within […]

As mutinous Lesotho troops take to the hills in preparation for a drawn-out struggle, we re-examine the report that caused all the trouble William Boot The Southern African Development Community’s mishandling of the Langa commission of inquiry and its inability to publicly admit that the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD)had fraudulently stolen the May 23 […]

Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg `Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson,” reads a note in the programme for the South African premiere of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, a mesmerising new production that took to the Market Theatre stage last week. It was the “to teach […]

“We protested here for almost seven weeks without a single window being broken and now look at our city – it has been destroyed.” – Lesotho opposition representative Mamelo Morrison, quoted in Business Day The quotation says it all. The Lesotho invasion would be laughable if it did not involve the loss of lives and […]

Jane Rosenthal MOTHER TO MOTHER by Sindiwe Magona (David Phillip); UNBROKEN WING by Bridget Pitt (Kwela ) In the 1980s a cartoon figure of a stout and immovable Black Sash lady with fist held aloft, subtitled “Womandla!” was created by poet and cartoonist, Gus Ferguson. It was an inspired conjunction of black and white resistance […]

Douglas Rushkoff Online Bill Clinton’s impeachment, if and when it comes, will not herald a crisis of Constitution but a crisis of media. Brilliant exploitation of television may have won this president his office, but he must blame his downfall on an inability to resist the impact of another, newer medium: the Internet. Indeed, the […]