What you should be listening to this month: The Cure’s latest antidote; Paul Hanmer’s mesmerising eddy of sound; the reloaded hits of Kool & the Gang; Diana Krall crooning the tunes; and Bongo Muffin’s Thandiswa, striking out on her own.
While their name refers to the standard volume of a can of beer, 340 ml’s music is more like an elaborate musical cocktail. Members of the ‘new big thing’ on the local music scene talk to Daniel Friedman.
"My husband has an incredible passion for saving lives. The media speculation does not fit the person he is," says Saffiya Ganchi, the wife of Feroz Abubaker Ganchi, the doctor held in Pakistan for alleged links with al-Qaeda. In the modest flat in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, Ganchi stares at the glass table with its scattering of daily newspapers their glaring headlines warning that "Al-Qaeda targets SA".
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=119924">SA Muslims too mellow for al-Qaeda</a>
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=119907">’No stone unturned’ in terror case</a>
The South African tourism industry is tackling the issue of transformation head-on, says newly elected president of the Southern African Tourism Services Association Mike Speed. Responding to the "call to arms" made by Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk, Speed is spearheading a non-profit organisation that intends to change the industry’s lily-white image.
The author Frederick Forsythe observed recently that if a train driver made a grievous error that cost lives, he would not walk away grinning. If an airline pilot did the same he’d probably never fly again. If the driver of a train fell asleep and caused a smash he’d end up in jail. But, considering recent events, it appears that politicians and their manadarins are exempt from all such responsibility.
It’s nowhere near Italy and there’s nothing sinister about it. Mafia Island is 120km south of Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital. It offers an alternative to Zanzibar to those besotted with the east African coast. <i>Escape</i> explores a little-known paradise in east Africa.
There must be only a few among us who do not know what is meant by the phrase “compassion fatigue”, the condition of near indifference that has come to supplant what should be outrage, grief, revulsion, even the most nominal of human reactions to each fresh horror of the world. The newspapers, the radio or television news bulletins brim with details of yet more bombings, more mass shootings, more rapings and murders.
United States officials last week insisted they were right to raise the alert over a potential terrorist attack against a US financial target, despite the fact that much of the information that prompted the warning was years old. But amid claims of political motives in the handling of the alert and scaremongering, is the US government’s high alert justified?
Much has happened in the world over the past century, but nothing perhaps is as important as the emergence of democracy as the standard form of government to which every country in the world is seen to be entitled. South Africa has an important role to play in upholding the ideals of modern governance while helping to create a just global society.
Kumba Resources, a major resources firm majority-owned by Anglo American, has interviewed 130 potential partners in its quest to meet the black economic empowerment (BEE) requirements of the Mining Charter. Presenting Kumba’s interim results this week, CEO Con Fauconnier said he hoped to go public about the company’s empowerment direction by the end of the year.