AUTHORITIES in Botswana have signed execution warrants for two convicted killers expected to be hanged on Saturday, the country’s deputy attorney-general said on Thursday. The hangings will bring to 34 the executions carried out in Botswana since its independence from Britain in 1966. The last executions took place in 1995 when five convicted murderers were […]

Ferial Haffajee speaks to Fred Khumalo, the editor of a new weekend newspaper which is set to roll off the presses in March The editor of Sunday World, Fred Khumalo, is the epitome of his new reader: black, stylish, discerning and upwardly mobile. He struts through the empty offices of his new empire, kitted out […]

Cameron Duodu Letter from the North As the guns boom around Freetown and its starving citizens cower inside those of their walls that have not yet been burnt down, who would have thought that Sierra Leone was once one of the favoured spots in West Africa? Its Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, was once […]

THE Cape Town Magistrate’s Court will decide on Friday whether to send for psychiatric observation a man who confessed to planting the New Year’s Day bomb at Cape Town’s Waterfront. Charles Manamela (25), a Nigerian who is a naturalised South African, was arrested on January 12 for a spate of bomb hoaxes in Cape Town. […]

The David Gleason Column Last week I addressed some of the issues surrounding the putative takeover by Driefontein of Gold Fields, a stratagem devised to get around the problems posed by minority shareholders who want to be paid more than is likely to be put on the table. Since then a lot of hot air […]

Alex Dodd It is Tuesday midday. We are driving along the N1, returning to Johannesburg after taking in Jo Ractliffe’s End of Time show in Nieu Bethesda. It’s hot and the road seems to go on forever. Attention is anaesthetised by an immensity of nothingness – nothing but the blank Karoo landscape and the road […]

force Chris Gordon Details are beginning to emerge of a vast resupply operation carried out by Unita, as the rebels strike at the north-west of Angola. Jonas Savimbi’s rebels are now better armed than in 1992, the Angolan government claims. It is a claim borne out by Unita’s new tactics and reports of the type […]

David Shapshak The Cabinet has discussed the possibility of deploying the army at the end of the year in anticipation of possible chaos stemming from the year 2000 computer problem (Y2K), says Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting Jay Naidoo. “I have discussed with the Cabinet the possibility of mobilising the security services in terms […]

JOHANNESBURG youth radio station YFM was hit by robbers late on Thursday night, who assaulted staffers and stole their possessions. Ten armed men stormed the station’s studio in Troyeville at about 11.30pm, forcing late-night presenter Msizi Shembe and his producer Desmond Mashaba to open the station’s safe. When they discovered there was no cash stored […]

Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week `God, yet another pooftah movie,” groaned a fellow critic at the preview of Turkish Bath last week. Well, yeah, gay and lesbian cinema is booming – even the studios are making films with homosexual themes. Universal Pictures made To Wong Foo, an inferior drag queen movie with Wesley Snipes […]