TENNIS: Jon Swift THE Italians are a people full of surprises. It is difficult to get things moving in the beautiful country, yet the nation had the sensitivity and foresight to sandbag the wall which carries the breathtaking fresco of the Last Supper during the time of the last global nastiness. And the chapel of […]

A proposal for a government news agency has fuelled the debate on the control of the media. Jacquie Golding-Duffy reports The South African Communication Service (Sacs) has thrown itself into the debate on the ownership and control of the media and has drawn strong criticism from some major newspaper groups. Sacs head Solly Kotane proposes […]

Eddie Koch The Truth and Reconciliation Commission this week faced challenges on three fronts just as it was gearing up to hear applications for amnesty later this month from agents who committed human rights abuses in the apartheid era. Firstly, the families of four murdered activists announced they will launch a Constitutional Court application for […]

A partnership between government and private sector has been formed to tackle development backlogs, writes Lynda Loxton Government and the private sector are investigating innovative financing packages to foot the estimated R170-billion to R230- billion bill to tackle infrastructure backlogs throughout the country. They met behind closed doors in Cape Town last week to examine […]

different views Simon Ndebele ‘That’s where the school used to be”, says Simon Ndebele, pointing to a piece of veld dotted with fragments of rubble. “My parents helped build it in 1946, and it became a wonderful place of learning for the Tswana aristocracy. By 1956, with the help of the missionaries, we had a […]

The Home Affairs Department plans to charge exorbitant fees for permanent residence, work permit and visa applications, reports Marion Edmunds All visitors to South Africa are going to have to pay up as the Department of Home Affairs is poised to charge for visas. And would-be permanent residents are in for a bigger shock — […]

Lucienne Fild in Windhoek FOLLOWING weeks of acrimonious debate, the controversial book about Swapo’s abuse of detainees, German clergyman Siegfried Groth’s Namibia: The Wall of Silence, was released at the weekend. The book’s revelations have threatened Namibia’s reconciliation process and calls have been made for a South African- style truth commission. Members of the public […]

Rehana Rossouw President Nelson Mandela spent a windy, hot hour at the annual choir competition at the Athlone Stadium in Cape Town at the weekend, promising coloured voters a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow nation. It was the second time this year he has taken time out of his hectic schedule […]

Opinions about the appropriateness of the sentences passed on the AWB bombers run the gamut of the political spectrum, writes Stefaans Brummer XOLISWA Falati stood at the bottom of the steps outside the Rand Supreme Court on Wednesday, holding aloft a poster denouncing the death penalty. She need hardly have bothered — that form of […]

Thabo Mbeki’s task team is fine-tuning a strategy to tackle its brief on government communications, writes Jacquie Golding-Duffy THE 10-member media task group appointed late last year by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki plans to take trips abroad in a bid to conduct in loco inspections of foreign government communication departments. Task group convener Mandla Langa […]