David Macfarlane and Glenda Daniels Petty power plays within the South African National NGO Coalition (Sangoco) threaten to jeopardise civil society participation in next year’s huge World Summit on Sustainable Development. In a move that has stunned the sector, Sangoco has suspended Jacqui Brown, whose work as CEO of the summit’s civil society secretariat, established […]

Jaspreet Kindra The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has accused the government of reneging on an election pledge to cross-subsidise the electricity tariffs of the poor. Cosatu was reacting to the National Electricity Regulator’s approval of a 6,2% annual price hike for Eskom the first above-inflation increase in more than 10 years. The […]

Marianne Merten Take sakkie-sakkie, add a substantial dose of hip-swaying rumba or samba steps and sultry salsa moves. What do you get? Jazzing, a particular Cape style of dancing at the heart of a competition currently on in three cities. Jazzing was born at the house parties of the Sixties to shake off the frustrations […]

You don’t really want to know what goes on in restaurant kitchens, do you? You’d be a lot happier not knowing about the fights, the blood, the drugs, the amoebas, the “hypermacho posturing and drunken ranting”. You don’t want to know why you shouldn’t order an elaborate special, particularly if there’s fish in it, or […]

Adobe has made its name in superb design software, but it may well be remembered for arguably its most useful gift to the software world: the Portable Document Format (PDF). Saving any document you have created in a Microsoft Office program is easier with the latest release, Acrobat 5, and you can select a range […]

I have been sent a letter about 62 young Israelis refusing to do military service. I have not heard or seen any reports about them and their plight. I am sure there are many who would be very interested to hear about this stand by these young men. This has a lot of relevance to […]

A nine-month old girl is in a serious condition in hospital in Upington after having been raped by six adult men, who were allegedly all drunk at the time. The child’s teenage mother was arrested at the same time, also allegedly drunk. The men’s ages ranged from 24 to 66. Were they too drunk to […]

Niki Moore The disgraced former deputy director general of the national Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Professor Musa Xulu, has turned up as the municipal manager of a small town in Zululand and is already causing havoc in his new job. Xulu was fired from his arts and culture post in December last […]

November 14 is World Diabetes Day, but the government has paid little attention to the rise of the disease Barbara Erasmus South Africa could learn a lesson from Tanzania when it comes to confronting the two plagues of the millennium the high-profile killer Aids and the less acknowledged pandemic diabetes. Tanzania has achieved recognition for […]

analysis Evidence wa ka Ngobeni In South Africa any political party that seeks to challenge the African National Congress’s power base needs to attract sizeable numbers of black voters. The political turmoil within the Democratic Alliance in the past few weeks has dealt a heavy blow to the Democratic Party’s aspirations for power. The withdrawal […]