Staff Reporter
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/ 22 May 1998

Hand-to-hand battle

Jack Schofield tries his hand at palm reading to assess the likely winners and losers in a cut-throat hand-held computer market After a shaky start, pen-based computing is booming, led by the success of 3Com’s PalmPilot – an electronic organiser that fits into a shirt pocket or handbag – and competition is hotting up. Psion […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Local papers’ offices burnt down

Wonder Hlongwa The offices of three southern Cape newspapers have been burnt to the ground in an apparent revenge attack for reporting on the activities of gangs in the Hangklip area. The offices of the Hangklip Herald, Hermanus Herald and Gansbaai Herald were set alight in the early hours of last Monday morning. A petrol […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Aces of Bassline

Shaun de Waal CD of the week The Bassline in Melville, Johannesburg, has proved itself to be one of the city’s most reliable jazz joints, perhaps even its best. Everyone who is anyone in South African jazz has played there, and this CD, Jazz at the Bassline (Sheer Sound), collects 12 works by this country’s […]

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/ 22 May 1998

‘Rehabilitated’ patients claim seven victims

Andy Duffy Psychiatric patients treated and released by Western Cape health authorities have killed seven people over the past 18 months, including two children, amid an apparent collapse in the system set up to monitor them. The former patients, all from the high- security forensic unit at Cape Town’s Valkenberg hospital, represent a small proportion […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Praise be to poetry

Phillip Kakaza It wasn’t too long ago that Zolani Mkhiva, an imbongi or praise singer, became Imbongi ye Sizwe -Ethe Poet of the Nation – when he took the podium and sang the praises of Nelson Mandela at his inauguration. Four years later, after protracted negotiations with recording companies, he has graced the nation with […]

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/ 22 May 1998

‘NP should shut up shop’

Charlene Smith The National Party continued its string of humiliating local government by-election defeats this week, polling a paltry 22 votes in the mixed coloured and African council ward of Bloekombos in the Western Cape. And an NP councillor, Bill Schibbe, who defected to the Democratic Party on Thursday said it was time for the […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Shares rise despite conflict

The South African pharmaceutical industry has been greatly expounded in the media in the past few months. The reason is not, however, as a result of the sector’s amazing rise in share prices, but as a consequence of frequent government intervention. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange pharmaceutical index has risen from a December 1997 low of […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Premier denies personal links with MI agent

Stefaans Brmmer Mathole Motshekga this week denied he was close to apartheid-era military intelligence frontman Abel Rudman – but the Mail & Guardian has documentary evidence of a meeting at the Gauteng premier’s house where shareholding in a resort development was discussed. The M&G published details a fortnight ago of Motshekga’s involvement in a series […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Dan Wylie: New poetry

TRANSFER by Ingrid de Kok (Snailpress R42,50) One can only celebrate this triumph of delicate bleakness: One by one the small refusals add up to a life. Or this rich characterisation of complex love: Mouthing under water wetly jewelled words we are acrobatic aquanauts in a chest of swords. The first half of the book […]

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/ 22 May 1998

Who will play Madiba?

Andrew Worsdale and Phillip Kakaza Announcing at the Cannes Film Festival this week that he would begin shooting the film of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in October, South African producer Anant Singh said he was still searching for the right man to play the lead role. He said he hoped to find an African for that […]