The Economist magazine has devoted a lengthy article to Anglo American’s staunch advocacy of conglomeration, which it points out is long out of fashion in business schools and American boardrooms. The Economist reports the reaction of Anglo chairman Julian Ogilvie Thomson to the 20 percent or so disparity between Anglo’s net asset value and the […]

The appointment of a national attorney-general could avoid a recurrence of the ‘McNally issue’, argue Dr Jeremy Sarkin and Suzie Cowen THE criminal justice system is in crisis. It lacks legitimacy and is seen as ineffective. It is in this context that the danger of giving attorneys-general independence, without creating mechanisms for effective accountability, has […]

SOCCER: Lungile Madywabe ORLANDO PIRATES’ hopes of being the first team from South Africa to feature in the finals of the Africa Champions Cup will be determined by the next 180 minutes of competition — starting on Saturday against Express of Uganda at the FNB stadium and culminating in two weeks time in a return […]

Janet Wilhelm Appearance: Historically disadvantaged patriarch with a penchant for dark designer suits and flash cars. Must be difficult to belong to a disadvantaged group? Not if you had the job of bantustan (sorry, homeland, sorry, independent state) leader. As Bophuthatswana president he consoled himself with lavish government spending — and evidence to the Skweyiya […]

Karen Harverson George Sombonos — owner of the R100-million Chicken Licken, the third biggest fast food chain in South Africa — is unperturbed and mildly surprised by the uproar caused by the successful outcome of his court case against US hamburger chain McDonald’s. He admits to feeling “very relieved” at the verdict delivered last week […]

Theatre: David Le Page A NAKED queen scrabbles in the dirt of a filthy dungeon, fighting off rats with a crucifix and babbling her way almost deliriously through the Lord’s Prayer. This is the opening of French Gray (at the Market in Johannesburg), a story not only of Marie Antoinette’s last hours, but of her […]

Ann Eveleth Only the wind stirred in Ebu-hleni when Rogers Ngcobo took the podium last Sunday. Tens of thousands of white-robed Nazarites, who had gathered in the tree-cloaked shantytown to mourn the death of their spiritual leader Bishop Amos Shembe, listened in stunned silence to his message. Ngcobo, a local bottle-store owner and non-Nazarite, told […]

Just outside Johannesburg last weekend, a group of South Africans met with a group of Cubans. It was a non-governmental meeting — civil society, not happy to leave matters to governments, working out the potential for cooperation between the two countries. It was also a rare meeting of international solidarity where South Africans were not […]

South Africa’s craft industry could be a gold mine, but its potential remains untapped, reports HAZEL FRIEDMAN IN a recently released document dealing with the future of the arts in South Africa, Dr Ben Ngubane, Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, paid tribute to the positive contribution made by the crafts industry to the […]

GOLF: Jon Swift YOU HAVE to hand it to Brent Chalmers in many ways. Chalmers, who carries the title of tour commissioner of the South African PGA — one would have thought that the association with a commission in the South African context is not a wholly healthy one — does tend to get things […]