News that hackers have steamed open the virtual envelope of e-mail has rocked the online world. Victor Keegan asks if we have any privacy left The revelation that Microsoft’s Hotmail has been hacked into sent reverberations around the entire Internet community. It was seen not only as the biggest security leak in the Internet’s history […]

Thebe Mabanga It’s brash, it’s crude and it is definitely sexist, but young people of Gauteng have voted with their fingers and made Yfm 99.2 their number one source of infotainment. According to the latest Radio Audience Measurement Survey (Rams) released by the South African Advertising Research Foundation, the station has achieved a daily listenership […]

Arts Alive is giving away CDs by two of its visiting music stars. Andy Narell (September 5 and September 8) and Femi Kuti (September 7) are two of the many luminaries to grace Johannesburg with their presence in September. The festival is giving away five copies of Andy Narell’s Behind the Bridge and five copies […]

Minister of Justice Penuell Maduna has not been our favourite politician in the past: the public protector’s marathon inquiry into the Central Energy Fund has made Maduna’s mouth arguably the most expensive in the country’s history. But he does deserve some applause for the controversy he has stirred up around the judiciary, not so much […]

UNITED States-based commodities giant Cargill Inc will stop trading in South Africa from mid-December to mid-January due to worries over preparations for the millennium bug, London’s Financial Times reported on Thursday. The paper quotes a letter from the head of the group’s South African subsidiary to the Department of Agriculture in Pretoria, pointing to a […]

Jeremy Cronin Crossfire Howard Barrell begins last week’s Over a Barrel column wondering: “If we believe someone is talking nonsense, should we bother to challenge him or her? Or should we just let their claptrap go .?” That is precisely the question I have been grappling with over many months of reading Barrell’s column. Exasperation […]

long season Michael Finch As South Africa returned from the World Athletics Championships this week, the issue of why they failed to perform in Seville was the subject of endless debates. Having won two medals at the 1997 Worlds in Athens, this time it was only Hezekiel Sepeng’s silver and two national records in the […]

Review of the week Brian Butterworth In Peter Brook’s play The Man Who, which opened last week at the National Theatre, we are presented with a series of neurological patients who seem, at first sight, to be impossibly exotic. A man with a detailed memory for 30 years ago cannot remember what happened in the […]

The Daily Mail & Guardian, online sister to the Mail & Guardian, is again the most popular news website in South Africa, growing a quarter in three months according to the latest industry-standard figures. The DM&G rated 2,034-million page impressions per month over the second quarter of this year, making it the first news site […]

identity Ebrahim Harvey A Second Look As tempting as it is, it would be a mistake to dismiss the current debate on who qualifies to be an African as simply a case of diversionary intellectual masturbation between black and white journalists, intellectuals and academics – as much as it has often come close to that. […]