There were many surprises at this year’s Cannes awards festival Fiachra Gibbons The controversial director Lars von Trier won the Palm d’Or in Cannes on Sunday night in the most flamboyant circumstances, insulting the head of the festival and assuring his leading lady – whom he called a “mad woman” only a fortnight ago – […]

The government’s legislation is a minefield of jargon, acronyms and bureaucracy Glenda Daniels If you are familiar with the SDA, SDLA, SAQA, ETQA, ETDP, Seta, NSF, NSA, and there’s more, you’re probably the only person in South Africa who is. Within companies confusion reigns over the implementation of the government’s bureaucratically heavy legislative plans for […]

Bandwidth (data speed and capacity) is not quite the gold dust of the internet era, but when a webpage takes five minutes to unfold in front of you, it can seem as scarce. So brush up on your electronic geology and discover how to get the best from your connection. Go to www.InternetTrafficReport. com for […]

And now Ethiopia and Eritrea are speaking the same language, writes Justin Pearce It began as a border dispute. But in the past two weeks, the Ethiopian army has swept through western Eritrea establishing effective control over almost a quarter of the country, before Eritrea agreed on Wednesday night to withdraw from the disputed territories […]

Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION It would seem that the recent and rather bizarre practice of apologising for historical wrongs is still on the increase. And flatly refusing to apologise for past sins has become almost as fashionable. People have realised that beating their breasts and slobbering on about what wrongs were committed before they were born […]

Marianne Merten Western Cape MEC for Education Helen Zille practises her Xhosa speech en route to open a computer room in Khayelitsha township. A last-minute call to a language teacher clarifies pronun- ciation and grammar as her driver Ishmael Hendricks negotiates the shack-lined roads and barely held together minibus taxis. Intlanganiso Senior Secondary School – […]

Dale McKinley CROSSFIRE For the past several years there has been a tendency among those on the left of the political spectrum (both domestically and internationally) to take a generally cautious approach when it comes to critically analysing the South African workers’ movement. However, the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (Cosatu) recent job-loss campaign […]

Charles David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY Prince Charles and I were born in the same year. Which is why I nurse a vague sense of identity with him. At least I remember feeling vaguely cheated as a child at hearing he had received a boy-sized, petrol-driven car which really drove for his birthday, while I had […]

Illicit affairs, crimes of passion and political intrigue combine in Love Stories, a new series on SABC3 Lesley Cowling Love has very little part in the cultural stereotype of what we are as a nation. South Africans are hardly considered the great romantics of the world – after all, we’re driven by political rather than […]

Jad Adams BODY LANGUAGE How much of a sexual revolution did we really see in the past century? Romance, monogamy, family and coupling are in the 21st century, as they were in the 19th century, still central to Western culture. Far from sexual freedom breaking the family, one of the most important sex reforms still […]