Duncan Mackay When Josiah Thugwane lined up on Blackheath last Sunday for the London Marathon, he did so free from the worry that dogged his every footstep through the streets of Britain’s capital 12 months ago. Then the Olympic champion was racked with concern about the safety of his family in South Africa, fearing that […]
competitors Charlene Smith Telkom is beginning to fight, and beat, their cellphone competition on their own ground. The latest Telkom innovation is its Call Answer service. First piloted over four months early last year to residential customers in Rosebank in Johannesburg and Middelburg in Mpumalanga, it is now beginning to pick up momentum with availability […]
Charl Blignaut : Music awards It was pretty evident, on entering the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg on Saturday night, that the 1998 FNB South African Music Awards (Samas) were not going to be the Grammys. The red carpet was peeling up from the steps, liberating several strips of thick white masking tape keeping it in […]
Lizeka Mda The government may be laughing all the way to the bank after snagging R819-million from the Aeroporti di Roma for a 20% stake in the Airports Company, but some company employees are unhappy. Black managers at the company say the strategic equity partner in the partial privatisation of the Airports Company was acquired […]
Anthony Egan LAST DAYS IN CLOUD CUCKOOLAND: DISPATCHES FROM WHITE AFRICA by Graham Boynton (Jonathan Ball, R99,95) This book is hard to categorise. Its title makes it sounds like journalism; parts of it read like an attempt to understand the democratic transition in South Africa. Much of it is reminscences of a childhood in what […]
Tim Radford Stone Age people built the first astronomical observatory centuries before anyone had thought they did. Scientists working in the Sahara have identified a series of megaliths that predate Stonehenge in Britain and other sites by more than 1 000 years. Around 6 500 years ago, an unknown people living in Nabta, southern Egypt, […]
Tim Radford Scientists who identified a single gene that protects against cancerous chemicals said this week a cancer-prevention pill could be undergoing trials within a decade. The Scottish team’s research found that a single gene may determine whether a smoker develops lung cancer. In an experiment with mice, scientists demonstrated that the gene provides a […]
Janet Smith Since Ordinary People revolutionised the South African TV documentary in the early 1990s – and, indeed, the way the SABC’s current-affairs producers approached their subject after that – Mail & Guardian Television has set a standard for all other independent film-makers to follow. Its most innovative work to date, the award-winning Ghetto Diaries, […]
US Martin Kettle Organisers of marathons and long-distance road races in the United States are barring or limiting entrants from Kenya – the most frequent winners – and offering higher prizes to American competitors. The move is overtly anti-African and, in many eyes, racist. The prestigious Bolder Boulder race in Colorado has just restricted Kenyan […]
Duncan Mackay : London Marathon When Dick Beardsley came over from the United States in 1981 to run in the first London Marathon, he received R125E000. This year R1,25-million was set aside to be divided between two runners, the respective Olympic and world champions, for appearing in the race last Sunday, with Josiah Thugwane of […]