Ten years from now, the solar system could be teeming with pint-sized space probes, each no larger than a baseball. That’s the claim of William Tang, of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), speaking last week at the 1998 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Aerospace Conference in Colorado. Tang works on micro-electro- mechanical systems, or […]
Charlene Smith As if the truth about Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy wasn’t devastating enough, now comes the news that not all chocolate Easter bunnies are chocolate – certainly not the cheap imported ones. Pity the Easter bunny that used to enjoy a tranquil life on supermarket shelves before being hidden under bushes for […]
A Roman death is always a noble death and the hearts of military traditionalists will have been gladdened by the dignity with which the commander of the South African National Defence Force, General Georg Meiring, this week fell upon his own sword. Modern constitutionalists may also take comfort from the effectiveness with which the executive […]
Victoria Brittain The fourth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda will be marked this week at Bisesero, where new evidence shows Tutsi survivors fought hand-to-hand battles against Hutu extremists led by local officials and businesspeople for 10 weeks. The survivors’ testimony also reveals how French soldiers drove away, leaving wounded and starving Tutsis at the […]
Mahluli Mngadi: In your ear In these days of wall-to-wall music everywhere, it is refreshingly rare to listen to a well-researched and produced programme on a local community radio station. But then one should not be surprised because Bush Radio is the mother of community radio stations in Africa. It was a founding member of […]
Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON We should all be grateful to Kader Asmal for giving a whole new meaning to the term Moral Rearmament. Spawned in the late 1930s, the original Moral Rearmament movement advocated absolute morality, private or public. Which is more or less what Asmal likes to advocate as the precept for quite a […]
Peter Vale: A SECOND LOOK We made the military, now the military makes us: to recognise this bromide is to understand the inevitability of what historians one day will surely call Georg Meiring’s Folly. Far too quickly for democratic comfort have searching questions over the military been driven to the corners of our national life. […]
Who is . . . Paul Mashatile? Mukoni T Ratshitanga Way back in 1987, while in detention at the small Jeppestown police station, Paul Mashatile never imagined that his jailers would one day have to account to him. Nor did the police themselves in those turbulent days think of being led by a township activist. […]
Krisjan Lemmer Last week Die Burger ran a sanctimonious article chiding two eminent neurologists for disclosing details of former president PW Botha’s stroke in his spat with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The crime the medics commited: disclosing to the world, without asking Botha’s permission, that the old crocodile had probably become mentally unstable as […]
Holistic land management has begun to take root in South Africa, reports Belinda Anderson Every year, almost 400-million tons of precious South African topsoil are washed into dams and rivers by inefficient management techniques. It is estimated that by the year 2020 all of South Africa’s dams will be silted up. The government attributes erosion […]