Neil Manthorp Cricket It has been a silly week on tour. For four years people have complained about the inability of various hosts around the world to organise a sensible itinerary. India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even Australia, who isolated the third and final test by sticking the World Series into the middle […]
Mukoni T Ratshitanga Vista University was plunged into crisis this week as students continued a boycott of their mid-year examinations while management reacted by shutting several of the campuses. Two weeks ago students demanded that the examinations scheduled to have begun last Monday be delayed by a week, saying they were unprepared and the timetable […]
Charl Blignaut investigates the fives rules for how to become a South African pop icon. (Don’t be scared to perform from the back of a truck) In 1985, six months after Lucky Dube’s fourth mbaqanga album had turned to gold – sales in excess of 25 000 units – the recording studio was again booked […]
Tim Radford United States space scientists believe they will be able to conjure up refrigerator and furnace insulation tiles out of thin air. They are experimenting with a composite material called aerogel, the lightest solid known. A lump of this “frozen smoke” the size of a man would weigh less than 0,45kg, but could bear […]
Suzy Bell On stage in Durban Five years ago a young lad called John was living in London. He woke up one freezing winter’s morning and decided to come home and promised himself that if he was not touring his country as a stand-up comedian by the age of 25, he’d become a panel beater […]
Aventura bid Ann Eveleth Minister for Public Enterprises Stella Sigcau came under severe criticism this week for “acting beyond her authority” in the sale of tourism parastatal Aventura. A senior government official and a member of one of four consortiums expected to lose the bid this week said Sigcau and her privatisation advisers, HSBC Investment […]
Simon Caulkin Stock options have become the Nineties way of rewarding top managers. But as the number of options being granted has exploded, so the boom in share prices has inflated the value of those options. The sheer volume of stock options has achieved such scale that it threatens to undermine the validity of company […]
Arvind Ganesan In their search for finite resources, oil companies must partner governments who may have dismal human rights records – witness Total’s involvement with the Burmese junta in constructing the Yadana natural-gas pipeline. In Colombia the drive to develop oil fields has landed companies in the middle of a war zone. To ensure oil […]
Will Tyler Of all Apple Computer’s troubles in recent years, the problem that has proved most difficult to solve is how to replace its ageing flagship, the Macintosh operating system (OS). Two previous attempts have failed. Earlier this month, at the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and interim CEO, revealed […]
Peter Mullan, winner of the best actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has a tale to tell those who wonder if it all might go to his head. It stems from his experience working on Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winner about the exploits of William Wallace. Mullan remembers watching the director of the second […]