OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 8.00pm. SOUTH African shares ended today’s session near their lows as a late burst of selling forced the entire market down. Dealers said JSE shares were pummeled by bad news, including weaker international markets, a declining currency exchange rate and concerns about emerging economies’ debt. The All share index closed […]
stars – the friends and enemies Colette The woman who owns the theatre [where Sartre’s play, Dirty Hands, was being staged], an ex-beautiful woman, a dreadful whore, having slept with thousands of men, took us to her home for dinner. The dinner was strange and wonderful: Arabian dishes, because she was once the mistress of […]
wife on Women’s Day’ Tangeni Amupadhi A well-known Johannesburg psychiatrist is to appear in court next week on charges of battering his wife on National Women’s Day. According to Yeoville police, where the woman laid charges of common assault, the psychiatrist – who cannot be named for professional reasons – attacked his wife twice on […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday 7.00pm. AN inquest into the murder of Cape Flats drug-lord and gang leader Rashied Staggie, on Thursday heard evidence in Cape town that the group responsible for his death, Pagad, at the time considered the murder to be a military operation. A police operative Captain David Africa told the […]
William Boot A secret commission of inquiry into the collapse of Namibia’s copper mining industry wrapped up its proceedings in Windhoek this week and is expected to move on to Johannesburg. It was established to investigate the role of Goldfields SA, owner of the Tsumeb Corporation Limited (TCL), in the closure of all four of […]
Mungo Soggot A respected arms expert, who was finance director for a South African company implicated in a massive weapons smuggling case in the United States, has been picked to run Armscor. Llewellyn Swan, who started as managing director of the weapons procurement company last week, has worked in the local arms industry for 22 […]
Sandra Spavins EMILY-KATE by Meg Jordan (Iris) This is a story about a little girl who temporarily goes missing on a farm in KwaZulu-Natal. It is a large-format picture book, but has more text than most books of this type. The average eight or nine year old should be able to read it, yet the […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 11.00PM SUDANESE head of state Omar el-Beshir on Friday lashed out at US President Bill Clinton for ordering a military strike on Khartoum, and said his country will take the matter to the United Nations. The US overnight launched Tomahawk Cruise missiles at “terrorist” targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. The […]
MONSTER MACHINES by Caroline Bingham (Dorling Kindersley) This book describes 12 different types of the “biggest, heaviest, chunkiest machines on the move”. These include a Boeing 747, a giant mining shovel with a mass of 240 tonnes and an enormous mobile crane with 18 wheels. The text is very simple and quite devoid of technical […]
Nicci Gerrard First Person Things aren’t just discovered. They have to be needed as well. The Vikings reached America long before Columbus. But the Vikings had no use for America, the way that the Spanish Empire did. And there are other more intimate kinds of discovery. When John Donne wrote of: O my America, my […]