Robert Kirby : Loose cannon Granthurst High Security Pre-Release Cellblock North Hampshire January 19 1998 My dear Mr Mandela I have heard that you might well be soon looking for a new political heavy to run one of your richer provinces into the ground. One of your UK talent scouts advised me to apply to […]

A medical programme to eradicate river blindness enters its second decade with great results, writes Anthony Gilbert For centuries, a debilitating, disfiguring and often blinding disease called river blindness (onchocerciasis) has plagued people who live in tropical regions. The disease is endemic in 35 countries, primarily in parts of Central and West Africa and limited […]

Greg Bowes Get the Funk Out (GTFO), the CD-sized magazine that billed itself as “the entertainment magazine for advantaged common folk” has ended its print-run. Its recently launched sister publication Explorer will continue to provide fortnightly listings for the Gauteng area. In its short lifetime GTFO transformed itself from a somewhat unfocused A4 mag to […]

Ferial Haffajee South African advertising agencies are hot- footing it into the rest of Africa, often learning as much as they are teaching. Local agencies have partners in agencies in most African countries. Eastern and southern Africa is covered best, although some agencies work in west and north Africa, as well as Mauritius. South Africa’s […]

Lesley : Cowling Material While the country is warming up to the Year of Science and Technology, the science councils are still in the dark about their funding from the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Representatives of the councils, charged with organising certain “thrust” areas, say the funding allocations for their projects have […]

yet Fusion energy and self-driving cars are just two of the possible spin-offs from space exploration, write Tim Radford and David Rowan In 1945, Arthur C Clarke wrote to Wireless World with a proposal for communications satellites in geostationary orbit, and it must have seemed like a fairy tale. In 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik […]

By Sechaba ka’Nkosi People’s power without the gravy train When the new African National Congress deputy secretary general, Thenjiwe Mtintso, was asked last month what her ambitions in the party were, her answer was simple: “I would like to see our slogan, ‘All power to the people’, implemented in reality.” This may sound mundane, the […]

Marion Edmunds An Israeli conman, posing as a devout Orthodox Jew, has duped Cape Town-based entrepreneurs into investing millions of rands in a fraudulent investment scheme and skipped the country. The SAPS’s Commercial Branch is investigating Shmuel Deri (29), who is alleged to have left about 65 investors, many from Sea Point and Clifton, out […]

Aspasia Karras While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same. Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites. Local government is […]

Steve Morris: Rugby It is an inevitable consequence of the continuing struggle this nation is having with the concept of joining the rest of the world and allowing the free flow of ideas and innovations, that this would be mirrored in the South African obsession for sporting activity. It is also understandable that the triumphs […]