DAVID LE PAGE, Johannesburg | Friday THE country’s largest providers of Internet services to home dial-up subscribers, M-Web, World Online and SAIX, are carrying links to child pornography websites on their servers. The links are part of the Usenet service, an Internet-wide system of virtual bulletin boards on which subscribers can place and respond to […]

A TRUCK driver was arrested at the Middelburg toll gate in Mpumalanga with hashish worth over R1 million on Tuesday night. The man, aged between 36 and 45, was arrested at about 10pm when members of the Middelburg branch of South African Narcotics Bureau, Sanab, reacted to a tip-off. Highveld police spokesman Captain Malcolm Mokomene […]

ATTEMPTS by four docking craft to reach Russia’s stricken nuclear submarine failed overnight as hopes that the surviving members of the 118 crew might be saved became increasingly pinned on foreign rescuers. British and Norwegian teams were racing to reach the Kursk, which has been gradually sinking into the sandy bed of the Barents Sea […]

”HITCH-HIKING” northwards by road and sea, bad-tempered descendants of South African queen bees that were brought to Brazil nearly half a century ago have begun arriving in Canada, says apiculturist Mehat Nasr of Guelph University, near Toronto. The ”Africanized killer bees,” as they are called, invaded and colonised the south western US over the past […]

Jeremy Cronin Crossfire Last Friday the Mail & Guardian ran an emotive banner headline, “SACP to grill free-thinker”. A long article by Khadija Magardie evoked the same heretic burning imagery (“SACP to grill outspoken McKinley”). On April 12 there was, indeed, a disciplinary hearing; it considered articles written in local and international newspapers by Dale […]

David Le Page An unprecedented alliance between top computer companies and anarchic Internet fundis looks set to produce the first serious competition to Microsoft’s Windows family of operating systems. On Tuesday IBM, Compaq, Sun, Hewlett-Packard and nine other United States companies announced the Gnome Foundation, which will speed the development of the Gnome desktop system. […]

Neil Thomas taking stock After decades of being run as a cosy old boys’ club, the changes to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) over the second half of the 1990s have been profound. The perception, justified by numerous moves to arrest change from the JSE’s main committee, was that the exchange was run primarily for […]

demand Khadija Magardie crossfire Any discussion on prostitution is replete with difficulties. Any attempts to critically address the issue, without resorting to decriminalisation, is met with derision and almost always has various gender types foaming at the mouth. To argue that something is fundamentally wrong with prostitution does not necessarily imply any adverse judgement of […]

Paul Kirk A Durban high court judge, Phillip Levisohn, has summonsed the deputy director of Prince Gideon Zulu’s Department of Social Welfare and Population Development to court. The summons will see top civil servant Eric Mhlongo appear before Judge Levisohn next month to explain why his department is being taken to court and sued with […]