A medical programme to eradicate river blindness enters its second decade with great results, writes Anthony Gilbert For centuries, a debilitating, disfiguring and often blinding disease called river blindness (onchocerciasis) has plagued people who live in tropical regions. The disease is endemic in 35 countries, primarily in parts of Central and West Africa and limited […]

Greg Bowes Get the Funk Out (GTFO), the CD-sized magazine that billed itself as “the entertainment magazine for advantaged common folk” has ended its print-run. Its recently launched sister publication Explorer will continue to provide fortnightly listings for the Gauteng area. In its short lifetime GTFO transformed itself from a somewhat unfocused A4 mag to […]

Ferial Haffajee South African advertising agencies are hot- footing it into the rest of Africa, often learning as much as they are teaching. Local agencies have partners in agencies in most African countries. Eastern and southern Africa is covered best, although some agencies work in west and north Africa, as well as Mauritius. South Africa’s […]

Aspasia Karras While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same. Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites. Local government is […]

yet Fusion energy and self-driving cars are just two of the possible spin-offs from space exploration, write Tim Radford and David Rowan In 1945, Arthur C Clarke wrote to Wireless World with a proposal for communications satellites in geostationary orbit, and it must have seemed like a fairy tale. In 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik […]

By Sechaba ka’Nkosi People’s power without the gravy train When the new African National Congress deputy secretary general, Thenjiwe Mtintso, was asked last month what her ambitions in the party were, her answer was simple: “I would like to see our slogan, ‘All power to the people’, implemented in reality.” This may sound mundane, the […]

Marion Edmunds An Israeli conman, posing as a devout Orthodox Jew, has duped Cape Town-based entrepreneurs into investing millions of rands in a fraudulent investment scheme and skipped the country. The SAPS’s Commercial Branch is investigating Shmuel Deri (29), who is alleged to have left about 65 investors, many from Sea Point and Clifton, out […]

Steve Morris: Rugby It is an inevitable consequence of the continuing struggle this nation is having with the concept of joining the rest of the world and allowing the free flow of ideas and innovations, that this would be mirrored in the South African obsession for sporting activity. It is also understandable that the triumphs […]

Andy Duffy Pollsmoor prison in the Western Cape has gone on alert following police reports that gangster Rashied Staggie is planning to get into the jail to confront and possibly kill inmate and rival gang leader Jacky Lonte. It is understood that the prison’s management has drawn up plans with the Department of Correctional Services […]

Lynda Gledhill At times this week it seemed as though the paint peeling off the walls was moving faster than justice inside the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court. There was nothing that could be done to stop the additional delays in court processes brought on by prosecutors’ refusal to work overtime. Defence attorneys, who at the beginning […]