FRIDAY, 4.00PM: FORMER Sarfu vice-president Brian van Rooyen, author of the dossier that spurred a commission of inquiry into the South African Rugby Football Association’s affairs, said he will urge the government to appeal the Pretoria High Court’s decision to set the commission aside. “This decision doesn’t vindicate Sarfu by any means,” he said, and […]
Jeremy Cronin: CROSSFIRE General Georg Meiring’s blunder in passing on to President Nelson Mandela a cock-and-bull story about a “left-wing” plot has got me thinking about Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals. What is the connection, you wonder? There have been persistent rumours about Stals’s role in the apartheid-era State Security Council. Little light has been […]
Ferial Haffajee The cocktail of a showbiz doyenne, an African princess and a struggle lawyer can only yield interesting results. This combination has seen African Media Entertainment (AME) cause quite a stir on the stock exchange and in the entertainment and film industries. From their offices at the MTN Sundome outside Johannesburg, David Dison (AME’s […]
Lynda Gledhill At Coronation hospital in Coronationville on the West Rand, tiny infants, born premature and just days old, lie inside incubators struggling to breathe as nurses check their vital signs and mothers sit by their sides. Outside this ward, the hospital is struggling to overcome new hurdles and re-emerge as a viable, respected medical […]
Last week, Matthew van der Want argued that we should be ashamed of the success of `clichd’ band Just Jinger. Diane Coetzer disagrees At least Matthew van der Want has the one characteristic always admired in the surfers who took to Umhlanga’s most lethal waves: pluck. But, in this case, the word applies less to […]
A paediatrician’s love of orchids led to the discovery that big doses of garlic could triumph over infection, writes Michael Nurok The Roman statesman Cicero advised that one should eat to live, not live to eat. Little did he know that more than 2 000 years later, gravely ill patients at Cape Town hospitals might […]
Shot dead at a taxi rank this week, James Zulu is more likely to be remembered as an Inkatha warlord than the great leader he could have been, writes Jesper Strudsholm The South Coast Herald once branded James Zulu “a warlord”. Zulu threatened to take the editor to court for defamation, but the paper was […]
Andy Duffy The group behind the controversial Aids drug, Virodene PO58, has so far spent around R1- million on the drug, including paying its manager roughly R150 000 for three months’ part- time work. Cryopreservation Technologies (CPT) refuses to divulge its funding sources, beyond its 10 feuding shareholders. But the extent of the expenditure, which […]
Education’s financial crisis is having a devastating impact on South Africa’s publishers of textbooks, writes Swapna Prabhakaran South African educational publishers face lean times as the Department of Education shifts gears, changing its approach to implementation of the new outcomes-based Curriculum 2005. While the new curriculum does require new textbooks, the department has sidestepped its […]
Unesco has declared 23 April -William Shakespeare’s birthday -the annual World Day of the Book. The idea has spread rapidly and successfully over much of the world. In Catalonia, Spain, for instance, there is a festival of bookselling, and buyers are given a rose. In Holland a well-known author writes a small book and this […]