TRISH MURPHY, Johannesburg | Friday 4.30PM. THE Angolan government is preparing for a full-scale offensive against Unita rebels, sources in Luanda and elsewhere in Angola report. Although Luanda denies it is preparing for war, it is also reported to be recruiting, as is Unita. Angolan president Eduardo Dos Santos this week was in France, and […]
Keith Henderson : Live in Johannesburg The queue for the Springbok Nude Girls outside the Roxy Rhythm Bar, Melville, was the kind which makes you feel it would be a lot easier to turn around and go home. There was probably at least one thing on television last Saturday that you could’ve fooled yourself into […]
Marthali Brand went to the opening of Graceland, the garish new casino in Mpumalanga Why is it that all roads to South African casinos lead through squatter camps? On my way to the opening of the first fully functional casino in the new South Africa, all I could think of as our luxury coach travelled […]
Jackie Bennion When Internet darling Yahoo! announced its second-quarter earnings earlier this month, it not only sent Wall Street into a frenzy; it also made the founders of the Web search site, Jerry Yang and David Filo, the latest additions to the Billionaire Boys Club. Two weeks ago, Broadcast.com went public with the biggest opening […]
Ferial Haffajee and Stuart Hess You can teach an old dog new tricks, as a legion of former apartheid spies, torturers and key dirty-tricks operatives are showing. Many are the frontmen of business’s push into Africa and are leaders in the private security industry, which is worth billions of rands. A former general, for example, […]
Brenda Atkinson If you’ve been waiting to exhale ever since the grade-school camerawork of Avenues swung its way across SABC 3; if you’re still wondering why paying your TV licence seems the wrong thing to do; if you’re considering ditching your M-Net subscription, don’t panic yet. e-tv, the hot and politically sound channel that snatched […]
Heather Connon The publishing industry could be transformed by the Internet in the same way that the music business was revitalised by the compact disc in the Eighties, according to Michael Lynton, president and CEOof Penguin. Sales of books through the Internet have been growing rapidly. Amazon.com, which created the market when it launched in […]
Tim Radford reports on a new probe of the red planet British scientists are hoping to land an instrument on Mars that will “sniff” the presence of extraterrestrial life. Beagle 2 – the name evokes Charles Darwin’s world- changing voyage aboard HMS Beagle in 1831 – could be launched aboard a European mission called Mars […]
Ed Vulliamy in Washington : Basketball After six Naitional Basketball Association (NBA) championships – the latest won in an epic final series against Utah Jazz last month – Americans are accustomed to gravity-defying acrobatics from the Chicago Bulls. But not of this kind. Last Thursday afternoon, the Bulls managed a contortion which beats almost any […]
Movies and television make kids illiterate, say the experts. Don’t you believe it. Colin MacCabe on some amazing findings Television and reading are opposed, right? What parent has not thought that a few episodes less of Sesame Street or Hercules would turn their children into veritable bibliophiles, at home with Dickens as well as Tolkien, […]