The National Research Foundation (NRF) is investigating ways to increase significantly the monetary values of annual grants for honours, masters and doctoral students as part of its plan to produce more researchers. Professor Mzamo Mangaliso, president and chief executive of the NRF, told Higher Learning that the allocations to honours and masters students, in particular, “were woefully inadequate”.
The economic boom being enjoyed by India is largely because of its outstanding records in higher education. The idea of universities as economic engines is nowhere else more realised than it is in India. India’s record of primary and secondary education is appalling, writes PG Raman.
About halfway through this book, I was still wondering why Natasha Distiller had felt the need to write it when — out of left field, so to speak (actually right field) — there arrived in my inbox a press release that provided at least one possible answer, writes David Macfarlane.
”If I am going to change anything in my script, it will be punctuation marks. I am not changing anything else,” says Cont Mhlanga, a prominent Zimbabwean playwright and founder of Bulawayo-based Amakhosi Theatre Production House, in response to the banning of his play titled The Good President.
Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Are Hanged: Book Two of the First Law (Gollancz) puts some very modern preoccupations — the nature of war and the motivation of torturers — under the fantasy glass. His main protagonists are, in his own words, ”a crippled torturer, a sneering, self-serving nobleman and a psychopathic barbarian with a bloody history”, writes Gwen Ansell.
Zimbabwe is a long way from being ready to join Southern Africa’s rand monetary union, South African Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni was quoted as saying on Monday. ”A very high degree of macroeconomic convergence is necessary. They have a very long way to go,” he said.
Seven people were killed in a collision between a bus and a fire engine in Port Shepstone in KwaZulu-Natal on Monday. The crash claimed the lives of three firemen and four bus passengers, six of whom died on the scene. Police spokesperson Zandra Hechter said the seventh accident victim died in the Port Shepstone Provincial Hospital.
Human remains believed to be those of the ”Pebco Three”, who were murdered by apartheid-era police, were found on a farm near Cradock, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Monday. Spokesperson Panyaza Lesufi said NPA investigators followed up several leads and discovered the remains during a dig on the Cradock farm known as Post Chalmers.
Iraqi fishmongers complained on Monday that rumours of river carp eating human flesh had caused sales to plummet, even though senior clerics denied reports they had banned the fish from the table. Over the past four years, the bodies of hundreds of victims of the city’s death squads and militias have been dumped in the Tigris.
Apartheid-era minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok and former police chief Johann van der Merwe will be charged with attempted murder next month. National Prosecuting Authority spokesperson Panyaza Lesufi said on Monday that the matter will be heard on August 17.