HOME Affairs’ highly paid special adviser Mario Ambrosini has been taking some time off during the past two weeks to keep tabs on KwaZulu-Natal’s progress at the Constitutional Court. (Perish the thought that either he or his boss, Mangosuthu Buthhelezi, would do party work on government time). Last week he was popping in and out […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy A Cape Town-based Muslim community radio station is being hauled before the Independent Broadcasting Authority following an alleged contravention of its licence conditions. Voice of the Cape, which shares air-time with Radio 786, is to appear before the IBA’s Broadcasting Monitoring and Complaints Committee (BMCC) on July 9 for allegedly failing to inform […]

BOXING: Gavin Evans THE first and last time Sugarboy Malinga and Vincenzo Nardinello met it was all hugs, kisses and fun and games in foreign accents. Fun’n’games, in fact, is one of the things this Italian enjoys most about the fight game, even when he is on the wrong side of a beating, as he […]

Muslim members of Mozambique’s Parliament are trying to pass a law recognising the days of Eid as public holidays. Andrew Meldrum reports from Boane Sabati Omar breaks from his work building a mosque to explain how Islam is growing in Boane, a rural area in southern Mozambique. “Every month we see somebody convert,” says Omar, […]

The West Coast diamond group is following De Beers’ lead in targeting higher-priced stones, writes Lynda Loxton West Coast diamond companies have had mixed fortunes in recent years, not least because of the dumping of low-quality diamonds on the world market by Russia. The agreement reached by De Beers’ Central Selling Organisation (CSO) and Russia […]

TENNIS: Mick Cleary and Jon Henderson in London THERE is scarcely an inch of the vast Wimbledon complex which is not landscaped with signposts, manned by livery-clad information guides carrying sandwich-boards or outlined in the bulging information brochures. The only thing the authorities forgot to include for the thronging crowd was an explanation of just […]

The excitement this week over the release of Greg Blank seems to have less to do with the merits, or otherwise, of the parole system than the general sense of frustration in the country over crime and punishment. As Blank himself has complained, he is “white and rich” and as such a ripe target for […]

M&G Crime Correspondent Angella Johnson, who spent 10 years working on papers like The Guardian, London Times and Los Angeles Times, finds herself at loggerheads with the SAPS `Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as […]

Singing along with Mariah Carey is no challenge, as Brian Logan discovered at her first-ever concert in London MARIAH CAREY once said about her video for the single Fantasy: “It’s difficult wearing all those hats, but the positive results were worth it.” By this standard, the UK debut of the top-selling recording artist of the […]

RUGBY: Jon Swift Boy Louw said it best. “Looks for the scoreboards” was his superbly unique and ungrammatical reply to criticism of how the Spingboks played. So it should be with the 43-18 scoreline from this week’s test against Fiji at Loftus Versfeld. This was not an inspired perfomance. But it was a winning one, […]