THURSDAY, 11.00AM: THE National Party lost 81% of its 1995 vote to lose 1419-386 to the Democratic Party in the Brakpan by-election on Wednesday. The winning candidate was the DP’s Shelly Loe, who defeated the NP’s Malcolm Laing in a 31% poll. On Tuesday, the DP won a clear victory in former NP bastion Bergvliet/Meadowridge […]

TUESDAY, 7.00PM: THE Council for Nuclear Safety is worried by rapid development near Cape Town’s Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, and says it must be brought under control. Further development could create enormous difficulties should an emergency evacuation of Koeberg ever become necessary, council general manager Jeff Leaver told the Minerals and Energy parlimentary committee on […]

Andy Duffy The National Party’s new Western Cape leader, Gerald Morkel, played a central role in propelling a convict’s outlandish sex claims against NP chief Marthinus van Schalkwyk into the public domain. Morkel, provincial police MEC and now premier elect, was party to the decision to put senior investigators on to the case. His office […]

Stephen Gray’s new poetry collection, his first in six years, has just come out. He spoke to Chris Dunton Your last collection, Season of Violence, appeared in 1992. Between that and the new volume, Gabriel’s Exhibition [Mayibuye], there’s quite a gap. Was there a break in your writing of poetry? To me Season of Violence […]

Penny Siopis’s new show enacts a dialogue between beauty and cruelty, between private and public, writes Tracy Murinik Quietly, to Chopin, two breasts bathed in blood-red paint dip and resurface as if by lunar pull. Beautiful, and slightly comical, this video seems to engage in ambivalent dialogue with Queen Cakes, a pair of “cup-cake” breasts […]

Chris Roper South African CD of the week The first words that the gravelly-voiced Arno Carstens croons on the opening track of The Springbok Nude Girls’ new CD, Omnisofa (Sony Music), are “we’re going to grow you up slowly”. It wouldn’t be too fanciful to imagine this as referring to the relationship between the band […]

living Expelled ANCleader Sifiso Nkabinde walks free on 18 charges of murder and the question is posed: who should be afraid this time? Ann Eveleth reports More than a dozen people died in KwaZulu-Natal hot spots within days of the acquittal of political wildcard Sifiso Nkabinde last Thursday. None of the deaths – one in […]

Tony Mechin As the leaders of the Zimbabwean Internet industry entered the Harare International conference centre in January for the opening of Internet@frica98, the country’s first Internet show, looming in their minds was the thought that the show billed as the “biggest Internet, intranet, cyber conference and exhibition in Southern Africa” was going to be […]

The National Party tabled a motion in the National Assembly this week (which, needless to say, was defeated) condemning our publication for what it described as an “untrue, vicious and malicious article in an attempt to smear the leader of the official opposition”. The motion was the latest in a series of attempts, mostly by […]

Women artists are taking control over their bodies and becoming overt exhibitionists. Joan Smith investigates Two women, two photographs. One shows a model in a dark tunic, her face turned blankly away from the camera, her raised hands holding apart the edges of a fur cape that frames the luminous V of her cleavage. In […]