Janet Smith Young and single was getting seriously boring till Ally McBeal made her case on television in the United States last year. Critics were yawning over the trendy narrative of ensemble casts in emotional crises after yet another season of superstar sitcom Friends, which earned that show’s cast a few million more. Come now. […]
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 […]
`Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the inscription on the Statue of Liberty urges the world. In South Africa, which we pride as a “land of liberty”, we electrocute them, detain them, deport them and, on occasion, lynch them. Even when they are not poor and huddled we […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Next time Spiwe Takura stands in front of police officers for her training session, she will have the perfect example of victimisation to present. A human rights trainer for the police in Gauteng, Takura claims her own human rights were shockingly abused in Yeoville. Her ordeal started at a supermarket last month when […]
Charl Blignaut Shopping and Fucking, a controversial new theatre production, has, against all odds, ushered in a new era for Johannesburg’s Market Theatre – in the process taking its young cast into uncharted territory. The play, which contains some of the most explicit scenes ever seen on a local stage, was always going to be […]
Mukoni T Ratshitanga Two University of Venda buildings were burnt down this week, causing more than R500 000 worth of damage. The student affairs block was torched during the early hours of Monday morning, while the office of the South African Students’ Congress (Sasco) was destroyed the next day. A group of Azanian Students’ Congress […]
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 […]
Douglas Rushkoff: ONLINE Of all the cool and creepy pieces of vapourware to have emerged since the Web went mainstream, the coolest and creepiest have got to be intelligent agents. And, according to the press releases jamming my e-mail server, they’re here: autonomous pieces of programming trained to race around cyberspace doing our (largely consumerist) […]
Multinationals are moving into hitherto untouched areas, with catastrophic results, writes John Vidal Amungme tribal leader Yosepha Alomang, a mother of 10, should be in Britain. But as she boarded the plane this month in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, to head for London and the Rio Tinto annual meeting, she was stopped by the military. Had […]
Nick Cumming-Bruce President Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie’s enthusiasm is infectious, but his head- spinning monologues have the power to wear anyone down – as Margaret Thatcher discovered while drumming up business in Indonesia. Purposeful as ever on a mid-1980s visit, she strode around the Bandung aviation plant with Habibie trotting beside her, talking furiously. Visibly flagging, […]