Social sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo that want to run your life for you are all the rage, but this shouldn’t distract from the strong growth of networks geared to special interests. When I wrote recently about the slowness of the digital revolution to hit the book world, I was hit by a shoal of letters listing stacks of sites not mentioned
Zimbabwe has set up a task force to monitor prices of basic goods and probe shortages fuelling the country’s runaway inflation, a Cabinet minister said Thursday. "The task force is being set up to monitor the prices [of goods] and their disappearance from the formal market," Industry and International Trade Minister Obert Mpofu said.
Just about everyone expected McLaren Mercedes to be better this year with a new, faster car and reigning Formula One champion Fernando Alonso moving from Renault into its number one entry. Alonso was able to fend off seven-time Formula One champion Michael Schumacher and his Ferrari for his second championship last year.
The wife of slain theatre personality Taliep Petersen appeared with three men in the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court on Thursday, charged with his murder. Petersen was shot in his Cape Town home in December last year. In the dock were his wife, Najwa, as well as Abdoer Emjedi, Waheed Hassen and Jefferson Snyders.
Venus and Serena Williams are teaming up again. They will play doubles together for the first time since 2003 at Wimbledon, where this year’s play begins on Monday. ”They requested a wild card and they got it,” Venus Williams’s agent, Carlos Fleming, said by telephone on Wednesday.
Riot police in Zambia arrested 49 students from the country’s biggest university in Lusaka who attempted to stage street protests against poor sanitation at their campus, police said on Thursday. ”Police arrested 15 female students and 34 males from the University of Zambia,” police spokesperson Chrispin Kapela said.
The Cape Town Book Fair has achieved much in its second year, writes Darryl Accone.
In an edited extract from the Africa Remix catalogue, critic and exhibition curator Simon Njami looks at the place of the African artist in society and the quest by artists to own their own territories.
Jane Rosenthal reports on the winners of the M-Net Literary Awards for 2007.
South Africa’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is to lead an African Union (AU) fact-finding team to the Comoros after elections in the rebel Anjouan island. An AU ministerial committee has rejected the outcome of the Anjouan poll.