Shaun de Waal CD of the week I aint down here for your money, I aint down here for your love, sings Nick Cave on the first song of the new Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (DGR). Im down here for your soul. Whether playing the hellfire preacher or the devils advocate, […]

Fiona Macleod Animal-welfare groups were scrambling madly this week to prevent Roy Plath, a central figure in the “canned” lion-hunting scandal, from exporting 17 lions to a hunting operation in Mozambique. Plath has sold the lions to a professional hunter, Andr Booysen and his father-in-law, Dick de Villiers, who own a farm called Pandane in […]

Suzy Bell On show in Durban IF there are at least two reasons for deciding not to emigrate to New Zealand, they are Durban actors Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson. But while us fickle Durbanites flocked to see the Americans (Jim Rose Circus) in their hundreds at the Playhouse Opera last week, this smaller, less […]

Cheap long-distance calls, and no special kit. Telkom should be worried, write Kevin Wilson and David Shapshak It sounds too good to be true. From a normal telephone you can place a long- distance call over the Internet and pay a fraction of the standard rate. The mechanics of how the Internet carries phone calls […]

If all goes to plan, controversial Aids drug Virodene could soon get the go-ahead, reports Andy Duffy A team of top medical experts, funded from the public purse, has been helping prepare the controversial Aids drug Virodene for clearance for human trials. The group, established by the Medicines Control Council (MCC), is working closely with […]

Phillip Kakaza Zimbabwean master drummer Jethro Shasha, well-known on the South African music scene, died at the age 46 last Sunday, having suffered for many years from diabetes. He played with many top musicians, including Malian Salif Keita. He was due to do a live recording with pianist Paul Hamner this weekend. Touched by Shashas […]

A black commercial farmer in the Free State claims to have been sabotaged by some of his white counterparts, writes Ann Eveleth The vultures started descending on Isaac Khumalo’s Vredefort farm soon after he took the plunge into commercial agriculture in December 1995. Thirty-one-year-old Khumalo, the Free State vice-chair of the Emerging Red Meat Producers […]

Stuart Millar He is probably the best-selling poet of all time after William Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. His books have sold more than 10-million copies in English alone. Even now, he is revered as a guru and an inspiration of the New Age movement. But now, 75 years after the publication of his most famous […]

Andy Duffy and Megan Voss The government is to send independent investigators into the University of the Transkei (Unitra) – the first time it has wielded the powers of intervention recently created through higher education legislation. The probe, due to start this weekend, will focus on what government officials have termed a “police state” allegedly […]

Alex Duval Smith in Casamance A quarter of a million West Africans fleeing on foot from fighting in Guinea-Bissau without food or water are heading north into another civil war where they face landmines, hostile Senegalese troops and swamps. As this human emergency advances on Casamance – the region of Senegal where a 16-year independence […]