MEDIA AND MARKETING CLIVE SIMKINS ‘DESPITE equality, wage parity and liberation, women still can’t: start barbecue fires, hook up a stereo, shine shoes, do anything on a roof, hang a picture, investigate mysterious house noises at night, kill and dispose of large insects, walk past a mirror without stopping to look.” — National Lampoon 1979. […]

Justin Pearce MORE than 300 candidates who were trained overseas last year with a view to bringing the South African diplomatic corps into the post-apartheid era are still waiting to take up posts with the Department of Foreign Affairs. This is in spite of the fact that the diplomatic corps has been left understaffed by […]

The defence ministry is investigating Armscor’s mysterious shipment of AK47s to Yemen — which may originally have been intended for Unita. By Eddie Koch, Paul Stober and Stefaans Brummer A CLANDESTINE consignment of AK47 assault rifles sent to Yemen by Armscor officials has opened new tensions between Defence Minister Joe Modise and conservative elements in […]

Pat Sidley THE fledgling cellular phone industry has become the latest field for thieves and fraudsters with about R10- million of theft and crime occuring in the five months of the industry’s life. The scams are so rife and the amounts involved so steep that police have seconded a full-time officer from the fraud squad […]

An explosion of shanty towns in the Vaal may force the PWV government to rethink its rejection of site and service schemes. Drew Forrest looks at the growing blight along the Golden Highway DRIVING south, it starts with Freedom Park and St Martin’s Trust, rambling down a hillside opposite Eldorado. Across the toll road lies […]

THE National Intelligence Service is so keen to show that it is part of the new South Africa that it is gathering information on the implementation of the reconstruction and development programme and identifying impediments to the implementation of this government policy. The NIS is out of bounds. It is the role of the national […]

The reconstruction and development programme White Paper may have doused some hopes. By Reg Rumney ‘NO cornucopia of new money for social upliftment programmes” is the hidden message of the White Paper on the reconstruction and development programme, the ANC’s grand plan to put right the economic wrongs created by apartheid, released last week. The […]

The Congress of South African Trade Unions has decided that it will not speak to the Weekly Mail & Guardian until its concerns about our coverage of the federation are addressed. Transparency, it appears, is for everyone in the new South Africa except the labour movement. Coupled with the embargo was an instruction to the […]

Drew Forrest THE number of shack dwellers in the Johannesburg municipal area has trebled in the past year, and the first shacks are starting to rise on golfcourses and parkland in the city. A year ago, according to Johannesburg’s director of urbanisation, Cedric de Beer, there were 2 000 shacks in the city housing 8 […]