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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

Review of the week Brenda Atkinson There are several possible responses to turn-of-the-century ennui, most of which involve an element of exhausted backlash and sudden nostalgia for other, better times and simpler cultural manifestations. I, for one, am aware of a growing yearning for time-honoured and outdated rituals like thought, beauty and big-band ballroom dancing. […]

LANSANA FOFANA, Freetown | Friday 10.00pm. DOCUMENTS before the High Court in Sierra Leone show that the brutal civil war in that country was funded by Tripoli and that rebels in Sierra Leone, as well as in other West African countries, recieved military training in Libya. The documents came to light at the trial of […]

retrenchments Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Final examinations at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) hang in the balance this year following ongoing unrest on the campus. Examinations have been postponed for two weeks, but the administration has not yet set a date for them to begin. In an extraordinary move, UWC’s senate has censured […]

hemp You’ve heard of lager, pilsener, draught and stout. Now there’s hemp beer. It’s called Hanf (“hemp” in German), made by Wdi Bru in Switzerland, and it’s finally available in South Africa (Cape Town and Gauteng only). At the third birthday party of Pretoria pita bar and reggae club Tings an’ Times on October 10, […]