Mariam Mayet The draft Environmental Management Bill (“Putting the people in charge”, Monitor, July 17 to 23) marks an extremely important departure from previous environmental policy and legislation. Unlike most current environmental legislation, which has been criticised for being a paper tiger, this Bill contains provisions that empower citizens to take up the cudgels for […]
Superficially, the former minister of law and order, Adriaan Vlok, may appear to be deserving of some credit for his performance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission this week. Unlike his former colleagues (Magnus Malan, the former minister of defence, is one name which stands out starkly), he at least had the guts to face […]
Coenraad Visser Escapism, or realism. Pretty girls in pretty dresses singing pretty, or the glamourless homeless, evicted from land and love. These are the opera choices in Gauteng this week. The Three Sopranos is, above all, a feast of glitz. Producer Tibor Rudas, the man behind the ageing three tenors extorting vast sums of money […]
Mail & Guardian reporter The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has come a teeny bit closer to determining which date it should set for South Africa’s second democratic elections. It’s not firm yet – but the IEC said this week the Constitution provided for the National Assembly elections to be held within 90 days of the […]
redistribution’ Derek Hanekom Ann Eveleth’s article “Land reform targets are far, far away” (Monitor, June 5 to 11) ignores the remarkable progress we have made in the past four years and the complexity of land-reform processes. The central argument is that we will never meet “the reconstruction and development programme promise to redistribute 30% of […]
Vera Rule investigates Chris Carter, the mysterious force behind The X-Files He’s from Bellflower, southern Los Angeles, a “burb” for guys who used to make aeroplanes; a part of what Chris Carter’s writers call the military- industrial-entertainment complex. Teenage Chris and a classmate drove 30km to Westwood, Los Angeles. The boy looked nervously around a […]
Claudia H Deutsch from New York For years now, environmentalists have tried to persuade investors to eschew putting money into companies that pollute. Not surprisingly, Wall Street has sneered, insisting that a good way to maximise shareholder wealth is to minimise environmental costs. But now the do-gooders are confronting the money folk with evidence that […]
showing Brenda Atkinson wonders why ads in trade magazines are so bad – and who creates these sub-standard promotions I was paging through a copy of Engineering News recently. I know less about engineering, but I maintain a healthy interest in a wide variety of topics, and have been known to frequent garages and hardware […]
Who is . . . Graa Machel?
out of a tree? Books were a symbol of oppression in Peru from the days of the conquistadors. Not any more. Sarah Dunant joined the farmer- librarians who trek the sierra collecting and delivering books Whichever way you look at it, the Rural Libraries of the Cajamarca valley in northern Peru is one of the […]