The South African Law Commission is reviewing the marriage Act to develop legislation to protect domestic partnerships, whether same- sex relationships or heterosexual cohabitation. While its report will only be out in July, another report looking at the sharing of pension benefits after a relationship has ended is due soon. The pension-benefits discussion paper will […]
The discovery of vast stretches of water between the stars has raised new questions about the origins of life on Earth, writes Tim Radford European scientists, using an ultra-cold orbiting telescope, have discovered unimaginable volumes of water in the space between the stars. The discovery raises new questions about life elsewhere in the universe -and […]
Mail & Guardian reporter The crusading journalist John Pilger set a cat among the pigeons of South African complacency this week with his hour-long documentary Apartheid Did Not Die, on what he represented as a betrayal of the liberation cause by the African National Congress. The documentary was broadcast in prime-time by the SABC, but […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg It seems to me there are two particularly compelling reasons to stage a tribute to Gibson Kente in 1998. In the first place, it’s about bloody time. We need, for the record, to preserve a body of work such as Kente’s in case we forget. Secondly, it’s a rare […]
At 82, Penelope Fitzgerald is the first non- American to win a United States national critics’ prize. She spoke to Peter Lennon There was something patronising about the pleasure with which the British media reported how modest and surprised Penelope Fitzgerald, aged 82, was at winning the American National Book Critics’ Circle fiction award, the […]
Although smart cards are set to turn public transactions with government into a one-stop shop, they do smack of big brotherdom, writes David Shapshak Smart cards – credit card-sized micro- computers – are set to revolutionise the way government delivers services to the public. But it will be a few years before the multi- purpose […]
Irwin Manoim In the paranoid final years of the PW Botha regime, the government had two tasks. The first was to suppress dissent; the second was to pretend there was no dissent. The latter, perhaps the more difficult task, fell to Stoffel Botha, former minister of home affairs, who died this week aged 67. It […]
WEDNESDAY, 12.30AM: FORMER Civil Co-operation Bureau operative Ferdi Barnard shrugged off any personal involvement in the 1989 murder of Wits academic David Webster in the Pretoria High Court on Tuesday, admitting, however, that the CCB could have been involved, and that some of his CCB colleagues may have taken part in the murder. A lucid […]
TUESDAY, 8.30AM: TWO candidates face off for the vacant seat of Western Cape Premier Hernus Kriel, who resigned on Monday. Health MEC Peter Marais, an outspoken hardliner, is the leading coloured National Party leader and the likely choice to hold the vital coloured vote in the next election. Rival candidate Gerald Morkel is the Community […]
TUESDAY, 5.00PM: NIGERIA, which has just replaced planned presidential elections with a referendum, has been criticised for the move by the United Kingdom and the United States. The elections for a civilian president were cancelled after all five authorised political parties nominated military ruler General Sani Abacha as their candidate. Now Nigerian will have two […]