Chiara Carter A visit by President Nelson Mandela this weekend sets the tone for the African National Congress’s Western Cape election campaign which is likely to ignore the thorny issue of race. The party is adopting a different strategy to 1994 when it suffered a bruising defeat at the hands of the National Party in […]

Andrew Worsdale : Movie of the week Joseph Ruben’s Return to Paradise is a remake of French director Pierre Jolivet’s Le Force Majeure (1989). The earlier version was not released on the local circuit, but some may have seen it at the French Film Festival in the early 1990s. The American remake is a gripping, […]

Head out of Cape Town toward the West Coast and the pulse of the nation slows. Time seems to pass more leisurely, and when you get deep west to the Wupperthal mission station, it is almost at a standstill. In this idyl nesting in the valley of the Cedarberg mountains, politics is less pressing, the […]

Mandy Collins With money too tight to mention, it seems a shame to be burning it in unnecessary fuel costs. But there is plenty you can do to lessen the financial burden of fuel, says the Automobile Association (AA). Start by recording your fuel consumption – you won’t notice an improvement if you don’t know […]

The first Ashes Test begins this Friday. Former England captain Mike Brearley recalls this specific kind of cricket animal Vulture Street, Brisbane: an aptly-named location for the start of an England tour. Wherever one finds it, a hostile sporting crowd embodies the stuff of nightmares. Batting or bowling, the player does his best. And what […]

Marianne Merton and Chiara Carter Cape police bungled a raid on the home of alleged People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) member Ebrahim Jeneker, who was arrested this week in connection with a charge of hijacking. Police raided Jeneker’s home on Monday and seized clothes and belongings for forensic testing in connection with violence on […]

Douglas Rushkoff online So, am I, like the last kid on the block to get my Hotline server up and running? It sure seems so. Not since I logged on to the Internet for the first time, back in 1988, and encountered the already-populated chat rooms, bulletin boards, and hacker groups, have I been so […]

Wonder Hlongwa A Jewish extremist group has threatened to “take action” against a Johannesburg Muslim family because of what a 14-year-old wrote in a history assignment. Last week, the Jewish Defence League (JDL) wrote a letter to Hassan Cassim, father of Layla, a grade eight pupil at Crawford College, demanding that she retract the contents […]

She writes textbooks for a living and composes poems about Sea Point. Karen Press speaks to Jane Rosenthal Poet Karen Press, who currently writes science and maths textbooks for a living, has lived in Sea Point for much of her life. Characteristically, she has had some dialogue with herself on what most folk would just […]

Wally Mbhele Former Transvaal attorney general Jan d’Oliviera – suspected of tampering with new evidence resulting from a trial he prosecuted – has started a battle to defend his reputation. D’Oliveira was the prosecutor in the trial in which three African National Congress members were convicted of the 1993 Eikenhof killings. The Pan Africanist Congress […]