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 […]

Jack Schofield Two years after it was launched, the Universal Serial Bus (USB), a connector designed to replace serial and parallel printer ports on personal computers, should start to take off this Christmas. More than 100-million personal computers have been shipped with built-in USB ports, software support has been provided in Windows 98 and Mac […]

Africa’s Oscars : Andrew Worsdale Two days before the launch of South African cinema’s biggest schmooze-fest, Sithengi, the film and TV market, most local players were gathered in force with the continent’s counterparts at last Saturday’s M-Net All Africa Film Awards in Pretoria. The State Theatre is a bit monolithic but the seats are so […]

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 […]

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 […]

Maureen Barnes : Down the tube Two of the most entertaining weekday series recently have been screened on e.tv. Dalziel and Pascoe is on Friday night at 9pm – a night which the other channels treat as thugs night in and over-excite their audiences by screening kung fu or Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. It’s a classic […]

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 […]