David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY In a country like South Africa where there seems at times to be an unhealthy subscription to fundamentalist belief it comes as something of a relief to hear laughter directed at Hansie Cronje for his evocation of Satan as the real culprit in the match-fixing scandal. At the same time one […]

The Springboks ease into the 2000 rugby season with a Test against Canada and some not-so-new faces in the team Andy Capostagno If we are to believe the coaching staff the Springboks intend to run the Maple Leaf ragged in the opening international of the season at the newly named Waverley Park in East London […]

The government’s attempts to airbrush President Thabo Mbeki’s recent blunders in HIV/Aids policy leave a nasty stain on the political and social canvas. The fact that the president flirted with, or even bought into, the dissident position on HIV/Aids, is his business and his business alone. The fact that he left the marks of his […]

Bryan Rostron recounts a close encounter with the pole-sliding publisher of Valley of the Dolls ‘South Africa – whaddya think when ya think, South Africa?” mused the exquisitely tailored New York publisher who had summoned me to his plush Manhattan office. “You think hot, right?” Suddenly he was struck by a bolt of literary inspiration. […]

Is teen pin-up Anna Kournikova bad for women’s tennis? Jon Henderson looks at the triumph of style over substance When word reached the photographers in the Wimbledon press restaurant that Billie Jean King’s opponent was in trouble on an outside court, they barely looked up from their games of cards. After all the year was […]

divisions’ Jubie Matlou and Sechaba ka Nkosi The long-awaited probe into the restructuring of the SABC has raised the possibility of privatising the corporation’s news divisions. The report by consultants Gemini, which was presented to the SABC board this week, recommends that an “ideal SABC news service would fully exploit business opportunities (that is, privatisation)”. […]

Barry Streek The government is spending R68-million a year fighting malaria and South Africa lost an estimated R19,4-million in productivity in 1998 and 1999 because of the disease, according to Minister of Health Mantho Tshabalala-Msimang. She told Parliament 26 445 cases of malaria were reported in 1998, 51 535 in 1999 and 24 047 up […]

Sasol could soon join the great trek that has seen several top South African companies list abroad Belinda Beresford Sasol, the oil and petrochemicals company which was synonymous with countering anti-apartheid sanctions, has outgrown the country of its birth. The industrial weakling that was nurtured to shelter the apartheid regime from the vagaries of international […]

exploding David Shapshak For once, you couldn’t really say that the film betrays a great novel. L Ron Hubbards’s novel Battlefield Earth is an epic mostly because it’s 1E064 pages long, not because it’s one of the great science- fiction novels of the genre. Hubbard is not the Tolkien or Asimov of his field and […]

Pensioners in the Eastern Cape are up in arms over chaos in the Welfare Department Peter Dickson Pensioners have rampaged through the Transkei, assaulting provincial Department of Welfare pay-out officials and taking others hostage, after the department quietly removed 20E000 welfare grant beneficiaries from the provincial register. The violent protests took place in Qumbu, Mqanduli […]