The Le Bourget Air Show in Paris is the meeting place=20 of governments, military men and high-tech innovation.=20 Stefaans Brummer attended this year’s show THE fashion this summer at Le Bourget, Paris: designer=20 suits, shades and cellphones, but very few skirts. The=20 Russians, of course, go for grimy anoraks, while the=20 South Africans stand the […]

Despite the process of reconciliation, there are=20 obviously judges who are struggling to break out of the=20 old mould, writes Dennis Davis IT could surely not have been expected that there would=20 be unanimous enthusiasm for the decision by the=20 Constitutional Court that the death penalty was=20 unconstitutional. But for a sitting judge of the=20 […]

1983: Anton Harber, junior reporter at the Rand Daily=20 Mail, receives a tip off that two strange people are=20 paying a black man to distribute anti-United Democratic=20 Front pamphlets outside Park Station in Johannesburg.=20 He is told to expect another rendezvous at 5pm that=20 Harber goes to the meeting place with a photographer.=20 The men […]

Jane Starfield DIVIDED SISTERHOOD: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession, by Shula Marks (Witwatersrand University Press, R82,00) SHULA Marks’ study of the South African nursing profession is as pioneering as her other monographs and collections of essays have been. Her attention to gender was notably voiced in Not Either an Experimental […]

The violent Hillbrow vibe inspired South Africa’s first industrial CD, conceived and executed by Paul Riekert. He spoke to FRED DE VRIES TO reach Paul Riekert’s home, you used to have to shake off the skinny prostitutes who positioned themselves in front of his Berea flat. Riekert also advised one to avoid Soper Road, “because […]

TELEVISION: Justin Pearce ‘WE’LL be okay as long as we stay in the light,” insists FBI Agent Dana Scully — a trifle optimistically, perhaps, as she cowers beneath the guttering lightbulb connected to a generator that’s about to run out of petrol in the middle of the night in an impenetrable forest inhabited by swarming […]

Reg Rumney When is insurance not insurance? When it is offered by a company not registered as an insurer, of course. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), in its 1994 annual report, states that it has submitted to an attorney general (AG) for possible further action the case of a furniture company which has […]

Shadley Nash The greasy details of rivalry between two take-away pizza traders emerged unwittingly in an unlikely place this week — the rape trial of a self-confessed The Port Elizabeth Supreme Court — sitting for the rape trial against satanist Frans du Toit who, in a third rape confession, admitted to raping a 20-year-old woman […]

OPERETTA AND CLASSICAL MUSIC: Coenraad Visser NOT even intelligent direction and two sterling individual performances can elevate Pact Opera’s production of Lehar’s The Merry Widow above the barely ordinary. Johan Spies directs the central characters with a sure hand to make their actions motivated and believable, a tall order in this often silly work. In […]

Oh, dear. Rusty Evans, dinosaur-general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, is upset with the Mail & Guardian. Did we get the facts wrong? Did we not do our homework? No, it’s much simpler than that. We reported on a conference and workshop where his department came under attack. But listen to his words. “I […]