Mungo Soggot A respected arms expert, who was finance director for a South African company implicated in a massive weapons smuggling case in the United States, has been picked to run Armscor. Llewellyn Swan, who started as managing director of the weapons procurement company last week, has worked in the local arms industry for 22 […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 1.20pm. THE Moerane commission into alleged irregularities in the department of former Gauteng safety and security MEC Jessie Duarte said on Thursday that there is a strong suspicion that Duarte was implicated in a cover-up of the accident she was involved in while driving her official vehicle. “However, a suspicion, […]
Andrew Muchineripi Soccer Premier Soccer League chief executive officer Trevor Phillips has tried and failed to reduce the size of the 18- club Castle Premiership, the richest national championship in Africa. This week, his South African Football Association counterpart, Danny Jordaan, tackled the same problem from a different angle, proposing that his organisation buy two […]
front David Hirst Last month an “important announcement” appeared on a website, , “in the name of God the merciful, the compassionate”. It consisted of a brief interview which the journal al- Murabitoun – mouthpiece of al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, Egypt’s largest underground organisation – had with one of the group’s exiled leaders, Sheikh Abu Yasser Rifai […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC) television news editor-in-chief designate Phillip Molefe describes his whole life as a strange coincidence prescribed by fate: he was born in Sharpeville exactly two years before the famous massacre in 1960 when police killed more than 69 anti-pass law protesters in the sprawling Vaal Triangle township. He started […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 6.00PM. ZIMBABWE has increased the number of its troops backing the Democratic Republic of Congo army against rebels from 600 to 2800 in the past few days, which have seen an escalation in fighting, the Zimbabwe Independent reported on Friday. “Initially, we had underestimated the number of foreign troops in […]
MONSTER MACHINES by Caroline Bingham (Dorling Kindersley) This book describes 12 different types of the “biggest, heaviest, chunkiest machines on the move”. These include a Boeing 747, a giant mining shovel with a mass of 240 tonnes and an enormous mobile crane with 18 wheels. The text is very simple and quite devoid of technical […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Dakar | Friday 11.00am. SOUTH African hammer thrower Chris Harmse, who is the African record holder in the event, won the gold medal at the African Athletics Championships in Dakar, Senegal ,with a throw of 72,11m on Thursday night. Nigerian competitors dominated on Thursday, with Clement Chukwu and Falilat Ogunkoya doing a double […]
The government’s economic policy will not be debated at the forthcoming jobs summit, writes Howard Barrell The government has beaten off the threat of a direct public challenge to its economic policy at the presidential jobs summit now due to take place before the end of October. This is another setback for embattled leftwingers in […]
Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week The Coen brothers – Joel and Ethan – made their first movie efforts on 8mm while they were kids, doing remakes of famous Hollywood movies they had seen. Eventually they did a pilot for a noir comedy-thriller, Blood Simple, and managed to gather enough money to film 30 minutes […]