Efforts to reform rugby, apartheid’s sporting religion, have foundered on old attitudes in high places. Donald McRae analyses the shaky progress so far AS white South Africa slipped into its usual breathless fervour for the first Test between the Springboks and the Lions, Brian van Rooyen sighed wearily. “I’m just an ordinary guy,” he said. […]

FRIDAY, 2.00PM HIGH Court Judge Edwin Cameron has ruled that Mineral and Energy Affairs Minister Penuell Maduna flouted basic legal rights when he fired the CEO of the Diamond Board. In overturning Maduna’s dismissal of Gerhard Bindeman, who had been CEO of the board since 1989, Cameron found the minister to have acted in breach […]

FRIDAY, 3.30PM GAUTENG Premier Tokyo Sexwale told the Gauteng Provincial Legislature on Friday that the reign of terror of taxi warlords has ended with the passage of amendments to the Road Trasnportation Act of 1977. The amnendment Bill, rushed through the provincial legislature on Friday, its last day of business before recess, gives Transport MEC […]

The race is on for 40 new casino licences, with black empowerment bidders in the forefront – but are casinos productive money-spinners? Ferial Haffajee reports SUNDAY afternoon and the millions are calling. Although it’s a week before the end of the month, scores of cars hurtle past Pretoria, past the barren squatter camps of Hammanskraal […]

Richard Cornwell FIGHTING resumed in Congo-Brazzaville this week, shattering a seven-day truce and fuelling international fears about the ripples of instability and violence spreading across Central Africa. Troops loyal to President Pascal Lissouba opened fire on French ambassador Raymond Cesaire as he left Lissouba’s palace, while Lissouba’s opponent, former president Denis Sassou-Nguesso, launched an assault […]

Marion Edmunds ALARMED by increasing internal tension and a range of government crises, the African National Congress is embarking on a soul- searching, stocktaking campaign to draw the party together in the run-up to its national congress in December. The head of the ANC’s political education department, Joel Netshitenzhe, said this week that the party […]

GWEN ANSELL took some top SA jazzmen to watch Kansas City THE first jazz shot in Robert Altman’s Kansas City is of James Carter, natty in a sharp suit, legs crossed insouciantly, sax gleaming, wreathed in cigarette smoke, looking for all the world like a Herman Leonard photograph come to life. Visually, the whole movie […]

The Heath special investigative unit turned its microscope on Mpumalanga this week, reports Justin Arenstein THE tribulations of Mpuma-langa’s disgraced former MEC for safety and security, Steve Mabona, may just be starting after South Africa’s most powerful investigative unit this week started probing his financial management of state funds over the past seven years. Mabona […]

David Ludman RAYMOND CHANDLER: A BIOGRAPHY by Tom Hiney (Chatto & Windus, R150) WERE it not for Raymond Chandler’s drunkenness we might never have had The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Long Goodbye and the other novels and short stories he gave us. The books Chandler produced in the Thirties and Forties are with […]

millions Mukoni T Ratshitanga A PHONECARD scam, thought to have been pioneered by engineering students, has prompted Telkom to launch a surveillance operation on university and technikon campuses across the country. The operator said it had lost R1-million in one week alone this month – when it discovered the fraud – and suspects a syndicate […]