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 […]

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, […]

Chiara Carter The head of the elite presidential task unit charged with investigating Vito Palazzolo is standing by what he told the Mail & Guardian about an alleged photograph of former minister of foreign affairs Pik Botha in a compromising position. Botha was reported on the weekend to have said he intended suing the M&G […]

Alex Sudheim In 1769, at the tender age of 12, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his first German operetta, Bastien and Bastienne. Although the music is light and fanciful, Mozart’s librettists based their apparently ingenuous tale of pastoral romance on some rather subversive material. FW Weisskern, JH Muller and JA Schachtner retooled the plot of an […]

Virgin South Africa have expressed their desire to sign Fetish. Lauren Shantall charts the band’s rapid rise The first time I saw Fetish, at their second-ever gig, they were decidedly terrible. Now, they’re the first and only local band so far to have been offered a recording contract with the recently formed Virgin South Africa. […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday 7.30pm. A MEMBER of the group responsible for the Bronkhorstspruit cash-in-transit heist in July last year was given R50000 of the spoils, even though he did not take part in the robbery itself, the Pretoria High Court heard on Thursday. Jerry Mashigo, who has turned state witness, said that while […]

SARAH BULLEN, Johannesburg | Wednesday 5.00pm. SOUTH African markets bucked an negative day on international markets to end firmer across the board as a long-awaited cut in the repo rate fuelled expectations that an interest rate cut is imminent. Dealers said that although the 25 basis point fall in the repo rate was only a […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 10.15pm. SOUTH Africa’s three-time World Matchplay Championships winner Ernie Els will meet rising European star Lee Westwood in the quarterfinals of this year’s event after Westwood thrashed Australian Stuart Appleby eight and seven on Thursday. Dimunitive Welshman Ian Woosnam, who replaced German Bernhard Langer at the last minute, beat Northern […]