John Ezard Climactic warming has destroyed part of the gigantic Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica. Final disintegration and melting of the 19 500km2 shelf is now predicted within two years. The crack-up, disclosed by a satellite photograph taken on March 23, confirmed and sharpened nearly a decade of anxiety about trends in a region […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 9.00PM. THE Richmond killers have been identified as a five-man hit-squad with military backgrounds, SABC3 has reported. Their leader is known to speak Afrikaans fluently, and police have been searching for them for a year already in connection with previous massacres. Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi announced the news […]
Marthali Brand : Spending it United States President Bill Clinton is still regretting the day he told the world he never inhaled. But if he had been speaking about cigars, he would not only have avoided embarrassment, he’d have won points for doing the right thing. Not inhaling is one of the golden rules of […]
Roger Cohen in Abuja `Look, the human rights here in Nigeria are terrible,” Theodore Luttwak says, “but the opportunities are just fantastic … where else in the world do you have so much money?” Good question. Abuja, Nigeria’s capital- under-construction, is full of the whiff of oil money, and not just at the exclusive golf […]
Alex Dodd – Milan, Marseille, New York, Rotterdam A short, hard-hitting film about xenophobia in the heart of Johannesburg by local film- maker Zola Maseko has been playing to thunderous applause around the world. This is the first time a film by a black South African director has achieved such widespread international acclaim. The Foreigner […]
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 […]
Howard Barrell : Over a Barrel What is one of the cleverest people in South Africa doing indulging so assiduously one of the vainest? Why has Deputy President Thabo Mbeki taken to bowing and scraping before Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha Freedom Party leader and minister of home affairs? Why has Mbeki been calling him Shenge, offering […]
Dan Glaister : First Person John Bayley has written a moving elegy to his wife, the writer Iris Murdoch, in the New Yorker magazine. It is a tale of two swimming trips to the same river near Oxford, United Kingdom. Two trips punctuated by a space of 40 years, and haunted by Alzheimer’s disease. “With […]
Death was the uninvited guest at a wedding in Richmond this week, turning joy into grief. Sechaba ka’Nkosi reports Doyi Shezi came home to Esimozomeni in Richmond last week to prepare for his second-youngest daughter’s wedding. On Saturday, he performed all the traditional marriage rituals at his homestead and handed his daughter Nonhlanhla to her […]
Adam Haupt If you’re one of those people who thinks that Steve Newman and Tony Cox are the only acoustic guitar virtuosos around, you’ve been lied to. It’s no sordid conspiracy, though. It’s just that Leslie Jovan sees himself as a community worker and not a musician. To him music is a vehicle for other […]