Stefaans Brummer and Mungo Soggot The law professor who guided the academic career of Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga and became a close friend had strong intelligence links and served as a front man for Renamo, the notorious Mozambican rebel movement backed by apartheid’s security establishment. Professor André Thomashausen, a constitutional law expert based at Unisa, […]

Martin Walker in Brussels A surreal war has broken out in Belgium as veterans of a revolutionary art movement rally against an arts festival in honour of the surrealist master René Magritte. The retrospective, to mark his centenary, is being billed by others as the biggest cultural event in Europe this year. The Belgian state […]

set It took 15 minutes to expose a wannabe legend of her time as merely a legend in her own mind, reports Hazel Friedman A pseudo-American accent, liberal dropping of Hollywood’s hottest names, a surplus of arrogance and extreme delusions of grandeur. That was all it took for con- artist Tracey Morrison to infiltrate the […]

Madeleine Wackernagel He’s not exactly Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch, but William Kirsh (36) is certainly following the global trend. This week’s announcement that Primedia, a listed company worth R2,5-billion, is forming separate music and film divisions is another step to realising his ambition of becoming South Africa’s own media mogul. The rationale is simple: […]

Aspasia Karras While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same. Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites. Local government is […]

Marion Edmunds An Israeli conman, posing as a devout Orthodox Jew, has duped Cape Town-based entrepreneurs into investing millions of rands in a fraudulent investment scheme and skipped the country. The SAPS’s Commercial Branch is investigating Shmuel Deri (29), who is alleged to have left about 65 investors, many from Sea Point and Clifton, out […]

A medical programme to eradicate river blindness enters its second decade with great results, writes Anthony Gilbert For centuries, a debilitating, disfiguring and often blinding disease called river blindness (onchocerciasis) has plagued people who live in tropical regions. The disease is endemic in 35 countries, primarily in parts of Central and West Africa and limited […]

Jos Havermans Despite the turmoil in the world’s stock markets, it seems almost every country in the world — even the poorest — wants to have its own stock exchange. And Malawi, one of the world’s 15 least developed countries, is no exception. After a three-year apprenticeship period, the Malawi Stock Exchange is poised to […]

Janine Stephen ‘I tell you what,” said local resident Jean George in a hushed tone, “that American lady was half bare.” Nominated for the 1997 Adult Video awards’ Best Group Sex Scene and Best Female Performer of the Year, United States porn star Christi Lake brought reporters flocking to Parow Industria on the dusty outskirts […]