Fiona Macleod First they were blamed for the Cape fires, now they’re being blamed for the floods. Experts say the huge forests of alien trees planted in the catchment areas of Mpumalanga have exacerbated the flooding that ravaged the province this week. Mpumalanga produces 39% of the country’s timber. Commercial timber, mostly pine and gum […]

Matthew Krouse CD of the week ‘The purpose of this album is to invite the world to discover the authentic, dynamic underground sound of the Japanese and European new jazz scene.” Oh, all right then – whatever that means – let’s turn it on. With such a heady pitch, brashly reckoning that the album is […]

Raymond Parsons The highways of economic policy matter greatly, especially for a developing country like South Africa. So it is right that stakeholders and analysts have been lavish in their praise of the president’s review of successes in the economic field and of his government’s objectives regarding the future of its economic programmes. These have […]

Michelle Matthews ‘The future of music is in dance music.” Promoter Kim Saville, although a self- confessed rock fan, is savvy when it comes to market trends. Realising that “people will always dance”, the exuberant, opportunistic music-lover started easing her way into dance culture. In 1998 Saville released the first Future Sound of Cape Town […]

She fled Pinochet’s junta and began to write as a way of coping with exile and loss. She became a best-selling novelist but her masterpiece was a memoir of her daughter, who died at 26. Maya Jaggi on a feminist pioneer of Latin American literature Isabel Allende divides her life starkly into two: before and […]

Marianne Merten The Democratic Party in the Western Cape wants to team up with its provincial coalition partner, the New National Party, to take on the African National Congress in the forthcoming local government elections. “It’s important the uni-city will be governed by the parties that form the coalition,” said DP Western Cape leader Hennie […]

Internet relay chat (IRC) became easier when “talking heads” arrived: you could have a face for each member of the conversation, even if it wasn’t their real face. Now Lake Clear Interactive has produced IRC Toons, a Windows program that can be downloaded free from www.irctoons.com. It lets you create characters for use on IRC […]

Tangeni Amupadhi Pressure is mounting on the Namibian government to reverse a decision that has plunged the country into the middle of the Angolan civil war. Namibian churches have joined organisations and individuals who criticised the authorities for allowing the Angolan armed forces (FAA) to use Namibia as a launch pad for its offensive on […]

downtown PE Barry Streek The first major land redistribution deal involving prime urban land has been sealed in Port Elizabeth, where about 4E000 people will soon be given plots in the middle of the city centre. The Department of Land Affairs is to pump R42-million into the residential development, which will span 140ha of land […]