The latest economic indicators signal a worse than expected slowdown, writes Max Gebhardt A HIGHER than expected jump in the inflation rate for September and falling consumer spending have forced economists to downgrade growth forecasts severely for 1997. The consumer price index (CPI) climbed by a full percentage point to 8,4% in August and growth […]

smugglers Dan Atkinson in London LONDON is at the centre of an $80-million-a- year gold-smuggling racket shipping stolen and otherwise-illegal bullion from Mozambique into Europe. Some of the metal is then refined in the United Kingdom, often in primitive garage refineries. It goes to the jewellery trade. “A lump of gold is a lump of […]

Nelson Mandela has pledged to find the truth of the Mozambican leader’s death. Pik Botha also thinks it would be a good idea David Shapshak FORMER foreign minister Pik Botha says re- opening the Samora Machel crash inquiry may be the only way “to clear up lingering doubts” about the circumstances in which the Mozambique […]

Gaye Davis FREE STATE Premier Terror Lekota this week said he would deal with disciplinary charges to be brought against him by a hostile provincial African National Congress leadership “when they came” and defended comments he made on a radio broadcast as the political row in the province escalated to a new intensity. Lekota also […]

This week’s guest writer Mandla Langa gives a personal account of his time as chair of Comtask A POET friend and comrade of mine who spent nearly three decades of his exile in the United States, speaks of menacing racist graffito sprayed on Alabama walls at the beginning of the civil rights movement. One particularly […]

TENNIS:Jon Henderson ACCORDING TO a remark attributed to no less an authority than her mother, Anna Kournikova is the future of tennis, which will be a source of hope to all those who have given up on the women’s game because of its cast of calamity-prone, one-dimensional “characters”. Certainly there is growing evidence that there […]

ONCE again the sight of Hutu refugees forlornly tramping from conflict in central Africa is tugging at the world’s heartstrings. It is a spectacle which has popped up on television screens periodically since the great exodus from Rwanda two-and-a- half years ago. And the United Nations is once again there to ensure that it can […]

REM frontman Michael Stipe’s dislike of clarity seems to grow with age. NEILSPENCER looks at his career FOR a man who has just carved himself a substantial slice of the biggest business deal in pop history, Michael Stipe sounds mightily disgruntled on his newly released album, New Adventures In Hi-Fi, and the bile flows from […]

PAPA WEMBA & KOFI OLOMIDE: Wake Up! (Sonodisc) KOFI OLOMIDE is back, this time pairing his smooth baritone with Wemba’s soaring falsetto for an album released last month. It sits firmly in the soukous tradition: plenty of soloing guitars, layered percussion and infectious sebene breaks on almost every track (for much of which we can […]

Famous scientists such as Richard Dawkins offer meaning for a post-religious age, writes Tim Radford RICHARD DAWKINS is nervous. This is very surprising. After all, he has done his homework: the topic for the evening is called “Arguments by Design”, a knowing play on the twist of natural philosophy that led indirectly to Charles Darwin’s […]