FRIDAY, 4.00PM: The soldier who removed the landmine intended to blow up Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s armoured Mercedes Benz (see below) said it was not powerful enough to penetrate the car’s armour. Lance Corporal John Manunure told the treason trial of opposition leader Ndabaningi Sithole that the claymore mine was an anti-personnel mine. While it […]

Andrew Spencer : Golf There is something very special about the Nedbank Million Dollar Challenge at Sun City. Perhaps it is the size of the seven- figure purse – in American money nogal – or the simple fact that this is an elite field on an elite layout carved out of a slice of unremitting […]

infections `One of the tragedies of life, sir, is that it’s possible to become like that which we hate most,” Bishop Peter Storey said in powerful testimony to the truth commission’s hearing into Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and her football team this week. The primary cancer, he owned, was the oppression of apartheid, but “secondary infections have […]

Owen Bowcott Detectives in Sydney this week ruled out auto-erotic sex games as the cause of rock star Michael Hutchence’s death, but said they were awaiting toxicology tests to determine whether he had taken drugs or alcohol. As the INXS lead singer’s distraught British fiance, Paula Yates, flew to Australia with their 16-month-old daughter, the […]

Mail & Guardian reporters The beginning of November was D-day for radio stations: one in five songs or 20% of their music must now be a home-brew. Although a number of radio stations are below that quota, only one has applied to the Independent Broadcasting Authority for a broadcasting exemption. Highveld Stereo’s station manager Malcolm […]

Dawood Dithato Deputy Minister of Safety and Security Joe Matthews will not be prosecuted on 12-year- old charges that he embezzled his clients’ money while practising as an attorney in Botswana in the 1980s. The office of the attorney general in Botswana is abandoning its long pursuit of Matthews after the deputy minister reportedly repaid […]

contempt Tim Jackson Gradually, the view took shape at Intel in the mid-1980s that the guys at Microsoft simply didn’t care that their programmes ran very slowly on Intel processors. Intel set up a team of three or four people inside the group developing its 386 microprocessor, and gave them the job of making sure […]

Dan Atkinson in London and Mark Milner in Seoul When Yamaichi Securities was looking for a discreet home for 1-billion-odd of bad trades, it didn’t have to look for long. There was really just one place for the duff trades – offshore. And, for the true connoisseur of offshore, the destination of the dud deals […]

Thebe Investment Company pioneered a new South African corporate culture but black business still has far to go, writes Charlene Smith Seven years ago there were no black companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange; indeed there was not a single black corporation. Pondering this, Vusi Khanyile, then finance head of the African National Congress, […]

Thebe is moving to consolidate its position by: * Restructuring of Thebe into six divisions from its present four. The two new divisions will be Thebe Communications, which will include its broadcasting and telecommunication interests (these include Khaya FM radio station, its television bid company Station for the Nation among others) and Thebe Travel and […]