Blandly beautiful Riaan Wolmarans After a rather long break Garbage return with beautifulgarbage (David Gresham), their third album. Will it be as popular as their first two? Maybe. It’s all there, the electro-pop with Shirley Manson’s cynical vocals, but it’s just not typical Garbage, with some accusing the band of becoming a pop sell-out. The […]

the Ben Trovato file ‘Mystery Author in Shock Disappearance”. That’s not what I expected to see when I opened the morning paper. It could only have been Ted or Brenda who betrayed me. To get to the package, my increasingly unstable wife would have had to wake before sunrise, slip through the hole in the […]

A successful project has brought water to a relatively poor township community Ngwako Modjadji When Christina Kekana (29) moved from her parents’ home in Tembisa to Ivory Park in 1990 it was a relief for the mother of two to move into her own house. The site allocated to her was a piece of unserviced […]

Mail & Guardian reporter A local NGO, Groundwork, has joined hands with two United States-based counterparts to introduce community-based air pollution monitoring systems in neighbourhoods that are located near industrial sites. For the past three weeks the three organisations have been conducting awareness and air-pollution monitoring campaigns in the piloted areas of Durban South, Sasolburg, […]

Simon Kuper The blue and white Argentina shirts are familiar, but the name on the back is not. “Basta,” it says. Surely that should be Batistuta? No, “basta” means “enough”, the emotion that the Argentine protesters wearing the shirts are trying to convey. “Basta,” they are telling the country’s politicians, its banks, the International Monetary […]

BOXING Maggie Davey In a land survey carried out in 1855 in the town of Ennis in county Clare, Ireland, the unremarkable note was made that one John Grady was renting a house in Turnpike Road in the centre of the town for 15 shillings a month. Around this time, and across the Atlantic, in […]

Kevin Scott Eskom health manager Carl Manser spends more than two of every three of his working days dealing with HIV/Aids. Producing and overseeing counselling services, developing education policies and training staff in ethics, human rights and government policy are all part of Manser’s daily routine. Recent research suggests a fifth of the workforce is […]

Glenda Daniels The explosion in media studies over the past few years in a rapidly shrinking market has not made the University of Port Elizabeth (UPE) shy away from introducing a new master’s programme in this field this year. But the course director of the MA in media, communication and culture at UPE, Professor Danie […]

Gideon Mendel is currently exhibiting A Broken Landscape as part of the exhibition Positive Lives in the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. This is his body of work depicting HIV/Aids across Africa, shot over the past decade. From February 16 the gallery will be filled with a vibrant installation that will both challenge […]

David Shapshak Ultimately, 20twenty’s most famous billboard pay-off line, a quote from Microsoft chief Bill Gates “Banking is necessary, banks are not” has come back to haunt it and most certainly its parent, Saambou. Despite being a rising local Internet star, the virtual bank is now part of the Saambou meltdown. Like Absa last month, […]