Thebe Mabanga The leadership of the Pan Africanist Congress has refused to condemn the violent disruption of schools in the East Rand township of Tsakane by its student wing, blaming Minister of Education Kader Asmal and African National Congress-aligned teachers for provoking the upheavals. The school disruption campaign by the Pan Africanist Student Organisation (Paso), […]

In future consumers will be able to do almost anything via their phones, writes David Shapshak ‘O and of course the vending mach-ines,” Karri Hautanen says, after rattling off a sophisticated list of what you can use your cellphone to pay for in Finland. When I comment on his laissez-faire attitude to what is still […]

From being the pride of Africa, South Africa is becoming more and more like never-never land. The recent, long-awaited announcement by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang that HIV does cause Aids, and that this is the basis of the government’s policy on the epidemic, is now being seriously undermined by the actions of a group in […]

A group of Americans is taking part in a hike to raise funds for research into a cure for Aids Susan Colby A group of 150 United States Aids activists will hike through the Cedarberg in the Western Cape, in an attempt to raise funds for the development of a vaccine against Aids. Each hiker […]

Ronald Suresh Roberts: apology On March 28 we published a story (“ANC tycoons in diamond rights row”) which suggested, among other things, that Ronald Suresh Roberts was among those who “headed” the New Diamond Corporation (NDC), which is currently in dispute with a section of a Northern Cape community over mineral rights on their land. […]

Juan Pablo Montoya brings a little insouciance back to Formula One Jim White The sound of summer fills the clean, clear air on the Costa Brava. A whine like a particularly persistent mosquito echoes through the orange groves, so loud it is playing the xylophone on the rib cage. The Williams grand prix operation is […]

Beats for beatniks Matthew Krouse The world, according to trumpeter Erik Truffaz, is a place of late-Fifties nostalgia where beatnik chicks lounge around, while the sound of “experimental” jazz wafts through the air, thick with the smoke of marijuana. It’s no surprise, then, that the cover of his album Mantis has abstract organic shapes on […]

Sarah Duguid A housing compound for workers at the Sangiro chicken factory lies tucked away behind a rabble of weeds and barbed-wire fencing near Hartbeespoort Dam, an area declared by Unesco to be a world heritage site: the Cradle of Humankind. A pile of rubbish sprawls across the path at the entrance to the compound, […]

Geoff Rodoreda in Stuttgart The South African-led international campaign to get foreign companies that invested in apartheid to pay reparations to victims has moved a step closer to international court action, following meetings in Germany with organisers of the successful multibillion-rand compensation claim for survivors of Nazi labour camps. Reverend Teboho Klaas, national coordinator of […]

Bongani Majola With mergers of tertiary institutions barely out of the starting blocks, the government has been dragged into another court action. This week unions at ML Sultan Technikon lodged an urgent high court application to compel Minister of Education Kader Asmal to defer the date of its merger with Technikon Natal, due to take […]