Andy Duffy Awaiting-trial prisoners are being held at CMax, raising fresh concerns about the rules prison officials follow before putting people into the controversial hi- tech jail. At least 10 suspects have been placed in the maximum security unit since Christmas, and police have played an influential role in the decision to use CMax to […]

Charlene Smith Barely a week after the pensions crisis in the Eastern Cape, a nationwide, million- rand inquiry into poverty is to be launched, where the poor will be asked to testify about the gravity of their situation. This will follow the first government report on poverty, which will be released by Deputy President Thabo […]

Marion Edmunds Skilled officials from the Department of Public Enterprises — including its chief accounting officer, Professor Sipho Shabalala — are abandoning their minister, Stella Sigcau. Sigcau’s representative, Wandile Zote, confirmed this week that Shabalala, public enterprises deputy director general, had resigned and would leave at the end of the month, in what appears to […]

Journalists frequently fall into the trap of writing too much about their own profession. It is, therefore, with some reluctance that we return to the subject, specifically by drawing attention to a column written in the latest edition of the Financial Mail by Joe Thloloe, headed “Motshekga and the media” — referring to the Mail […]

Jos Havermans Despite the turmoil in the world’s stock markets, it seems almost every country in the world — even the poorest — wants to have its own stock exchange. And Malawi, one of the world’s 15 least developed countries, is no exception. After a three-year apprenticeship period, the Malawi Stock Exchange is poised to […]

Zimbabweans have come to learn that mass action counts for more than policy. Iden Wetherell reports Zimbabwe’s beleaguered government this week responded to the crisis engulfing it by a familiar mix of bravado and brute force. But the steps it has belatedly taken only serve to expose a pattern of misrule where populist impulses substitute […]

Lynda Gledhill At times this week it seemed as though the paint peeling off the walls was moving faster than justice inside the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court. There was nothing that could be done to stop the additional delays in court processes brought on by prosecutors’ refusal to work overtime. Defence attorneys, who at the beginning […]

Ann Eveleth Aruling by a Pretoria judge last week effectively makes University of Cape Town vice-chancellor Mamphela Ramphele’s old school imaginary. Judge Ben du Plessis decided that Stephanus Hofmeyer Farm School near Kranspoort in Northern Province did not exist as a legal entity at the time its staff and pupils were evicted because its governing […]

set It took 15 minutes to expose a wannabe legend of her time as merely a legend in her own mind, reports Hazel Friedman A pseudo-American accent, liberal dropping of Hollywood’s hottest names, a surplus of arrogance and extreme delusions of grandeur. That was all it took for con- artist Tracey Morrison to infiltrate the […]