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) […]
Lesotho’s elections have been declared fair, but a host of inconsistencies points towards vote rigging, writes William Boot in Maseru The day before Lesotho’s general elections last Saturday, Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) leader Pakaditha Mosisili stuck his neck out to predict: “We will win by a landslide.” He said this at a time when […]
The male-to-male escort industry is booming, servicing clients who are typically middle- aged, affluent, white – and most often married. Charl Blignaut spends time at a whorehouse In the quiet street of a leafy suburb in the east of Johannesburg not even the next-door neighbours know that the house next door is a brothel. Why […]
Chris Gordon Luanda’s frantic daytime commercial activity belies tension in the peace process, but at night the city falls quiet, reflecting the fears that the low-level war will increase when the United Nations completes its pull- out at the end of June. The new impasse comes as Unita refused to hand over their political and […]
Stefaans Brmmer: A SECOND LOOK Nicholas Biwott is Kenya’s political bogeyman. The minister of state in the office of President Daniel Arap Moi has a reputation that embraces ruthless murder, kleptomaniacal patronage and cynical manipulation. Any edition of one of Kenya’s more adventurous journals is as likely as not to make reference to what they […]
Stefaans Brmmer Staff in the Gauteng premier’s office were to attend a compulsory workshop on Friday to discuss the prevention of leaks of government information. A copy of the “invitation” was leaked to the Mail & Guardian. The “confidentiality workshop” – addressed by National Intelligence Agency staff – was convened amid growing acrimony between Gauteng […]
negotiations Thembela Kepe, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ben Cousins Despite the depth of the problems faced by the Wild Coast spatial development initiative (SDI), it has a great deal of positive potential – and it is not too late to correct the mistakes. However, the defensive response to our article (”Tempers flare on Wild Coast”, May […]
Andy Duffy Special state investigations swallowed more than R40-million of taxpayers’ money in just 12 months, the government’s finance watchdog has found. The figures, buried in the report the auditor general released to Parliament earlier this week, point to a sudden acceleration, in the 12 months to March 1997, in the government’s drive to call […]
Dale T McKinley: CROSSFIRE What hole did Kuseni Dlamini (Crossfire, May 22 to 28) just climb out of to proclaim the death of the left? I’ll take a wild guess that it was the one he dug for himself in the depths of the corporate bowels of De Beers where, I have no doubt, the […]
Chris Roper On show in Cape Town In the catalogue for his exhibition, Stuart Barnes states that ”in a university, library books on the subject of ambiguous sex have suffered a history of violence: they have been mutilated. Pages have been torn and images of intersex genitalia excised from them. As a preventative measure they […]