Marianne Merten A key figure of the Cape Town gang and drug underworld has moved out of town in the face of new anti-organised crime legislation to clamp down on the profits of illegal dealings and assets bought with illicit profits. For some time Colin Stansfield, head of the drug cartel, The Firm, has been […]

With the approach of Nelson Mandela’s retirement commentators will soon be offering their epitaphs on the political career of a president who will no doubt be long remembered as South Africa’s greatest leader.

As the Nobel Prize brings attention to Portuguese literature, Stephen Gray looks at a poet with a South African connection Ten years ago in these pages, Carmel Rickard reported from downtown Durban on the unveiling of a plaque in honour of the centenary of Fernando Pessoa’s birth. This, in turn, was at the foot of […]

Cocaine, whisky, grass, Dunhills, whisky, cocaine… Staying up all night with the bad boy of US literature is a trial. Marianne Macdonald lived to tell the tale Hunter S Thompson’s big things have always been raising hell and taking drugs, and though he is now 61, neither hell nor ill-health will stop him. He holes […]

DAVID LE PAGE, Johannesburg | Friday 9.00pm. THE Lesotho government has washed its hands of the issue of 30 Lesotho Defence Force soldiers arrested on charges of mutiny, saying the law must take its course. But the opposition, which has demanded the soldiers’ release, is arguing that the soldiers’ mutiny was a political issue and […]

indifference Mark Atkinson in Washington When Asian currencies collapsed last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank came to the rescue with multi-billion-dollar bail- outs. Since 1985, when Tanzania began implementing its IMF structural adjustment programme, the local currency, the shilling, has devalued by 1 500%, yet the country will not qualify […]

l The Nobel Prize in Physics: Professor Robert S Laughlin, Stanford University; Professor Horst L Strmer, Columbia University; and Professor C Tsui, Princeton University for discovering that electrons acting together in strong magnetic fields can form new types of “particles”, with charges that are fractions of electron charges. l The Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Walter […]

Loose cannon: Robert Kirby Sometimes journalists actually do get that whopping Sisyphean boulder to the top of the hill. It takes a great deal of heaving and huffing, but eventually down it tumbles, taking the Emmanuel Shaws, the Jesse Duartes with it. It needed literally dozens of press, radio and television boulders to coax, motivate, […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby With The Truman Show about to overrun our cinemas there will be those who look upon the final weekend of log fixtures in the Currie Cup as another example of media manipulation. Griquas play the Falcons, Western Province play Natal and the Blue Bulls play Free State. In terms of log positions, […]

reserve’ land A new land law is set to overturn decades of paternalistic land relations between the state and more than 70 000 people living on former “coloured reserves” in the Western Cape and surrounding provinces. But similar legislation for former black homeland residents is still bogged down in “consultations”. Department of Land Affairs Director […]