CD OF THE WEEK: 50 Cent’s last album, The Massacre, sounds like the work of someone for whom music is merely a sideline, a distraction from the serious business of perpetuating a violent, ghoulish sideshow, writes Alexis Petridis.
MOVIE OF THE WEEK: Mira Nair does a good job of turning William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair into a two-hour celluloid production with Reese Witherspoon at the helm, writes Shaun de Waal.
In football, messiahs should never reach middle age. Far better that they suffer martyrdom young or fall under a bus before their 40s. Otherwise they become mere mortals. This is what has happened to Kevin Keegan, whose final exit from the game at 54, which his departure from Manchester City surely is, has been his least dramatic.
When he took over from Sir Bobby Robson earlier in the season, I said Graeme Souness would provide the backbone that Newcastle’s relegation-bound flops desperately needed. It took time, of course, but after the stirring 4-0 win over Olympiakos in the Uefa Cup on Wednesday night, the Toon finally began to sing the name of their Scottish boss.
Of all the charges levelled at Jose Mourinho in the past fortnight, Uefa’s prissy suggestion that he is a poor role model has to rank among the more obvious instances of cobblers to emanate from their saintly halls. ”Coaches are role models for the players and the fans,” the Uefa communications director William Gaillard said of the Chelsea manager.
Three white lions have been reintroduced into the heart of the Timbavati, almost 30 years after their species disappeared from the famous private reserve bordering the Kruger National Park. The three white lions arrived in the Timbavati heartland barely a week before a major row erupted between Bantu Holomisa and the Timbavati chairperson over commercial trophy hunting in the reserve.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Friday said that the recently announced closure of clothing manufacturer Rex Trueform’s Salt River plant threatened to put another 1Â 000 people out of work in the Western Cape and bring the clothing, textile and leather industries one step closer to complete collapse.
The national government has been accused of misleading the public over a 10-year period about its progress in combating adult illiteracy. The astonishing litany of misrepresentation is set out in a paper by University of KwaZulu-Natal academics Professor John Aitchison and Anne Harley.
Property mogul Norman Benjamin and his accountant Emiliya Peneva, at the centre of a R16-million empowerment scandal in the Eastern Cape, were arrested this week following a Mail & Guardian exposé. The Joint Anti-Corruption Task Team took Benjamin and Peneva into custody in Cape Town on Monday. They appeared in the city’s magistrate court charged with fraud.
From March 18 your movie experience will change utterly. Ster-Kinekor has announced that 80% of its movie houses will be turned into ”discount venues”, where seats will be unallocated and cost R14 each. In a move to revitalise cinema-going, hit by home entertainment and pricey tickets, the 30 ”Junction” movie houses will be largely located in malls used by black people.