Arizona North America is home to literally dozens of active stock exchanges, from the continent’s oldest in Philadelphia to Canada’s premier market place in Toronto. If you prefer something offbeat, there are the frozen floors of the Alberta Stock Exchange in Canada’s great white north or the arid airs of the little-known Arizona Stock Exchange. […]

Nick Paul, resplendent in designer khaki, gets lost in tent town and discovers the Durban July is little more than a freak show July day sits in the middle of Durban’s social calendar like a large, clever, sharp-tongued Berea matron with a fine mind and too much time on her hands. Everyone wants to be […]

Anthony Egan THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN SURFACE by Kate Turkington (Penguin) Historians, philosophers and even a few theologians have frequently declared the death of God and the end of religion. Yet today we see a religious resurgence on almost all fronts: pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity, often militant Islam, renewed interest in the occult, New […]

Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL There are, I’m sure, many reasons to admire communists. One which dwarfs all others, though, is their talent for rationalisation. Their ability to explain away past failures in such a way as to be able to retain a set of ill-fitting core beliefs is quite remarkable. The origin of this […]

Five lucky Friday readers can each win a set of five volumes in the recently relaunched Oxford World’s Classics series -Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. All […]

Belinda Beresford The power of compounding interest is on your side when you make extra payments on your bond. Say you have a R150 000, 20-year bond at 22% interest with Standard Bank. The total cost – capital and interest – of the bond would be R668 542, and the monthly repayment would be R2 […]

Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon Since this week’s column is devoted to a passionate defence of Ms Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, I think I’m going to have to settle for using her initials: FMS. This might make her sound a bit like a financial house – which she has recently hinted she is – but it’s necessary. When […]

Sechaba ka’Nkosi A single mother of three is conducting a lone mission to ensure that the largely masculine metal industry respects its female employees. So determined is Rain Chiya to prove that women are as capable of controlling massive machinery as men are, that she pushed her way into a position as a crane driver […]

Alex Dodd Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu has been accused of old-order politics by South Africa’s chief censor after she threatened to ban an art exhibition of child nudes at the Grahamstown arts festival. The row between the two was sparked by artist Mark Hipper’s exhibition Viscera, on show at the Rhodes University […]