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/ 6 February 2004
If someone shouts "Truce!", it means a temporary cessation of hostilities. But be sure that when it’s over the war will go on. Thus the "truce" called by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), in conjunction with the Department of Trade and Industry, in the war on software pirates.
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/ 6 February 2004
The UN’s top nuclear official called for a new international regime to destroy the flourishing black market in nuclear technology on Thursday, describing current controls as ”kaput”. Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said the trade in the technology was now a dangerous ”supermarket”.
The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> reveals how the African National Congress, through its close association with an empowerment oil trader, joined a dangerous courtship dance with the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. The story raises important questions about party funding and the extent to which our ruling party may be prepared to use its access to state power to get more of it.
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/ 6 February 2004
"I’d never been skiing. I’d tried ice-skating once, but spent the whole horrible half-hour clinging to the bar at the side of the rink, my ankles shaking either through feebleness, fear or both. So when I was told that even I could learn to cross-country ski in three days, I was sceptical." There’s more to skiing than plunging down snow-covered slopes, as Dea Birkett found out.
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/ 6 February 2004
”We are marching because we are concerned about the serious threat to health care in this country. It is the inability to pay doctors better — we are losing our experienced doctors.” Angry doctors will march on Parliament on Friday, the day of the State of the Nation address. Dr Kgosi Letlape, chairperson of the South African Medical Association, speaks out.
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/ 6 February 2004
The late black consciousness leader Steve Biko once said "no average black man can ever at any moment be absolutely sure that he is not breaking a law." This year we celebrate 10 years since South Africa officially became a non-racial country, so I would like to believe that Biko’s observations have spread to people of other hues, writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
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/ 6 February 2004
St Lucia has been long a playground for those with four-wheel-drive vehicles, fishing boats and diving gear. But ever since the area was declared a World Heritage Site in 1999 –- and 260 000 hectares of forest, military land and scattered game farms joined to create the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park -– playtime in the area has been severely curtailed.
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/ 6 February 2004
There is a tranquility in soap opera that brings transcendence to its disciples. Which is why I was inconsolable this week when I tuned in to contemplate my Midwestern nirvana and found instead something called the Africa Cup of Nations. Lotus blossoms and incense flew across the room as sage-rage took hold.
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/ 6 February 2004
Privatisation in South Africa lost momentum last year as the ruling African National Congress deferred to its trade union ally, suggests a new report by the BusinessMap Foundation. The government frequently cites the poor market conditions and state of the global economy as reasons for not pressing ahead with privatisation.
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/ 6 February 2004
About 40% of the South African adult population — or about 11-million people — have at least one basic bank account, a South African Reserve Bank publication has estimated. This compares poorly with the number of "banked" Americans — about 90% of the total population.