Marianne Merten It is not unusual to see asylum seekers gathering outside the locked doors of Customs House on Cape Town’s foreshore as early as 7am. Hours later, the narrow linoleum-tiled corridor outside the fifth floor refugee office is a jumble of languages, frustration and patience worn thin among the dozens of applicants and home […]
Andy Capostagno rugby It is likely to be a quiet evening in Couran Cove on Saturday. At their retreat on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the Springboks will be digesting the opening Tri-Nations Test between Australia and New Zealand. And maybe as they tuck themselves up in bed for the night, they will ponder the fact that […]
Frans Botha will be on a hiding to nothing on Saturday when he fights a great heavyweight champion Gavin Evans I suppose I should admit to some bias here: first, I feel passionately about Lennox Claudius Lewis. Second, I’m not so wild about Francois Johannes Botha. The Botha thing I can get out of the […]
Glenda Daniels Occupational health and safety inspectors from the Department of Labour are resigning in droves and some have been suspended amid mounting concern about a major overhaul of the department. The exodus of staff coincides with a backlog of 5 000 unexamined accident cases, including 700 fatalities at workplaces across the country. In just […]
Tim Radford In 1999 there were more disasters than ever before and they killed more people than any year in the decade except one. According to the latest Red Cross report, there were 623 forest fires, floods, landslides, avalanches, earthquakes, tsunamis, epidemics, droughts and volcanic eruptions around the world. They did economic damage estimated at […]
Pretoria Girls High has been dragged into the sleazy underworld of crime and drugs Thuli Nhlapo and Thebe Mabanga Just a few months ago, Tanya Oosthuizen was one of South Africa’s luckiest teenagers – a bright, young and attractive brunette, head girl of one of Gauteng’s leading schools with a range of lucrative professional careers […]
Bryan Rostron Consider, in the light of Zimbabwe’s election, this report on the political background to the renaissance: “Now, if the interests of the ruling class are at stake, the Constitution is no longer altered, but simply abused, the ballot boxes are falsified, the officials bribed or intimidated.” The economic consequences, meanwhile, are all too […]
Grant Shimmin You’ve got to feel sorry for the Aussies. (Well, you might if they weren’t the people who kept thumping us at every sport under the sun.) Here they are, organising the Olympics in a host city that has every natural advantage going, and things just keep going wrong. You don’t have to look […]
Belinda Beresford The avalanche of Aids deaths flattening economies and smashing people’s lives is also rumbling at the heels of the pharmaceutical companies. Access to life-saving drugs, particularly anti- retrovirals, has been the cry of the Aids 2000 conference. For many that meant lowering the costs of drugs so that not just those in the […]
Fiona Macleod A pack of 20 wild dogs, one of South Africa’s most endangered species, has been sold to a zoo in China where wild animals are kept in tiny cages and are forced to perform circus acts. Estimates of how many wild dogs there are left in South Africa range between 400 and 500. […]