Mungo Soggot The taxpayer’s bill for Public Protector Selby Baqwa’s exploration of Minister of Minerals and Energy Penuell Maduna’s possible slander of the auditor general is on track to outstrip the corruption watchdog’s total annual budget of R7,5-million. At least five legal teams are due to appear before Baqwa’s investigation, which should run for at […]
Lynda Gledhill Sitting in a luxury hotel dressed in brightly coloured clothes, Ester Mujawayo does not exude the air of a woman whose life has been destroyed. But this Tutsi from Rwanda is one of the few survivors in her family of the genocide that gripped her country in 1994. For a month, Mujawayo, her […]
Charl Blignaut It’s something of an unusual relationship, but there you have it. Like it or not, the international actor, prince of protest theatre and executive director of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, John Kani, has throughout the past decade forged a very particular partnership with groundbreaking turn-of-the- century Swedish playwright August Strindberg. It all started in […]
Tim Radford meets the Princeton professor whose warning on human genetic engineering has drawn fire from critics but growing acceptance from scientists Watch out for Homo proteus, the species that changes its own shape. Last month Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking told President Bill Clinton – at a millennium lecture at the White House – that […]
Angella Johnson Five-year-old Magriet is practising her ballet steps, twirling around the cane furniture in her living room, watched by loving parent Gertruida Greyling, and Hermien Oosthuizen. The Brakpan lesbian couple celebrated a historic court decision this week when a judge ruled that their sexual proclivities do not preclude them from bringing up a child. […]
The South African Law Commission is reviewing the marriage Act to develop legislation to protect domestic partnerships, whether same- sex relationships or heterosexual cohabitation. While its report will only be out in July, another report looking at the sharing of pension benefits after a relationship has ended is due soon. The pension-benefits discussion paper will […]
The discovery of vast stretches of water between the stars has raised new questions about the origins of life on Earth, writes Tim Radford European scientists, using an ultra-cold orbiting telescope, have discovered unimaginable volumes of water in the space between the stars. The discovery raises new questions about life elsewhere in the universe -and […]
At 82, Penelope Fitzgerald is the first non- American to win a United States national critics’ prize. She spoke to Peter Lennon There was something patronising about the pleasure with which the British media reported how modest and surprised Penelope Fitzgerald, aged 82, was at winning the American National Book Critics’ Circle fiction award, the […]
Although smart cards are set to turn public transactions with government into a one-stop shop, they do smack of big brotherdom, writes David Shapshak Smart cards – credit card-sized micro- computers – are set to revolutionise the way government delivers services to the public. But it will be a few years before the multi- purpose […]
Irwin Manoim In the paranoid final years of the PW Botha regime, the government had two tasks. The first was to suppress dissent; the second was to pretend there was no dissent. The latter, perhaps the more difficult task, fell to Stoffel Botha, former minister of home affairs, who died this week aged 67. It […]