Andy Duffy The Ministry of Education wants to spend R200-million this year to boost leadership skills in the provinces – a plan that will also give national officials far greater control over the often chaotic management of provincial education. The plans include setting up a rapid response unit to defuse provincial crises in areas such […]

Christopher Reed in Los Angeles After an acrimonious debate, the San Francisco school board has become the first in the United States to require students to read books by “authors of colour”. The measure caused conflict when proposed by two black members, who initially insisted that seven of the 10 required books on high school […]

Krisjan Lemmer With less than a year to go before the centenary of the Anglo-Boer War, there has been muttering in the Dorsbult Bar about the belated discovery by the Brits that Lord Herbert Kitchener, the war hero, was a bit of a cad. The BBC’s Reputations series appears to have stumbled upon the fact […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby When Geoff Cooke was England’s coach in the glory days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he had a phrase that used to come out whenever journalists believed that a player had been unfairly discarded. “The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” he would say. It is interesting to speculate whether […]

unrest Mail & Guardian reporters The army weapon and ammunition heists in Bloemfontein may have been intended to fuel instability in Lesotho. This scenario was flighted by security experts this week as police made their first arrests. Lesotho has been racked by protests since claims by opposition parties that the ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy […]

Tangeni Amupadhi Superintendent Jan Brink religiously abides by the proverb that the early bird catches the worm. He says it is the only way he can catch crooked cops napping. So he was up before the crack of dawn on Wednesday morning, travelling to Soweto, Roodepoort and Krugersdorp. His team arrested police in a surprise […]

Neil Manthorp Cricket As far as records show, there were no Bears in the South African touring sides that sailed for England in 1924, 1929 or 1960, the only three occasions on which South Africa have played England at Edgbaston before. In 11 series against the colonisers, the colonised have won just three – and […]

and clothes Andy Duffy An independent probe has found that the Student Representative Council (SRC)of the troubled University of the North (Turfloop) spent more than R1,3- million last year on items such as hired cars, catering and clothes. Poor controls had also left the SRC accounts open to fraud – more than half the expenditure […]

Mungo Soggot A Canadian mining company has accused De Beers of trying to hijack its rights to mine a lucrative diamond field in the Northern Province. The company, Southern Era Resources, also believes old-guard government officials have conspired against its bid for a mining permit at the Marsfontein field. De Beers apparently passed over the […]