Taking advantage of loyalty programmes that offer travellers rewards makes sense in this competitive age Angus Begg Shamiyana is a 30-year-old South African working for a cellphone company in Seattle, United States. I’m in the seat next to her on a business class flight to Amsterdam, and in between the odd glass of champagne and […]

telescope stakes David Le Page In five years South Africa will be home to the second-largest optical telescope on Earth, thanks in large part to the ingenuity of Cape Town astronomer Darragh O’Donoghue. O’Donoghue has come up with an improvement to the plans for the South African Large Telescope (Salt) that will allow it to […]

Barbara Ludman Their work could not be more different – Anne Sassoon’s haunting shapes and faces, Hadassah Levin’s lyrical landscapes. But there are certain commonalities – two, actually – which make sense of their joint exhibition, on until the end of the month at the Lighthouse Gallery in the ancient city of Old Jaffa, just […]

Stephen Bierley TENNIS Lleyton Hewitt, the brilliant 19-year-old Australian who so spectacularly defeated Pete Sampras in the Stella Artois final at Queen’s last Sunday, found his Wimbledon path heading back towards the reigning champion this week when the draw was made for the championships beginning next Monday. Hewitt, the seventh seed, who pulled out of […]

What’s new Getting vehicle and household insurance online is not only becoming easier; South African companies, like Nsureline (www.nsureline. com), are pushing the envelope in what’s possible over the web in the first place. The company, which is part of the BoE group, recently launched a secure site that delivers an impressive range of services […]

delays Evidence wa ka Ngobeni The Northern Province public service commission has launched a probe into alleged irregularities involving the selection of prescribed textbooks for the province’s schools – irregularities that could lead to serious delays in textbooks reaching pupils. This comes less than a week after Minister of Education Kader Asmal announced the appointment […]

Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH Sometimes I can’t help feeling that the “education” that we got in school was invented by a con artist, sold by a charlatan and taught by a mountebank. In my day, for example, we were often forced to memorise “recitations” containing high-minded maxims that were supposed to guide us […]

Andy Capostagno RUGBY When a great player shows signs of mortality it is a brave coach who tells him to shape up or ship out. Whether it was because of a knee injury that has not properly healed, a paucity of playing time or that most elusive of facets, a lack of ambition, scrumhalf Joost […]

Plenty of people have modelled themselves on him, but Tom Waits has never slunk in anyone’s shadow Tom Cox We are complete numbskulls to believe it’s true, of course, but there’s a brief moment at the Rex Theatre in Paris when several thousand of us think that we just may have been given Tom Waits’s […]

Meet the judges who will be presiding at the prestigious Investing in the Future Awards Mail & Guardian reporter An impressive panel of opinion-makers have agreed to judge the Investing in the Future Awards. The awards laud corporate social investment in South Africa and were established over a decade ago by the Mail & Guardian. […]