THEATRE: Andrew Wilson ACTORS Greg Melville-Smith and Karin van der Laag deserve medals, not only for excellent performances, but for coping every night for an hour and a half with visionless direction and a clich-infested script. As the first tangible production from the Civic Theatre’s 1996 New Stages project, Please Hold I’m Coming, written by […]

MUSIC: Bafana Khumalo LAST weekend’s Soul Invasion Tour at the Johannesburg Stadium was a memory lane affair rather than a young-and-with-it bash where the latest trends in dance and music ruled the night. What with Randy Crawford leading the pack of late Sixties and early Seventies crooners; The Stylistics; those kings of funk Kool and […]

The escape of nearly 1 000 prisoners this year highlights fault lines in the over- burdened criminal justice system. David Shapshak reports THE parlous state of the South African Police Service was underlined yet again this week with the release of figures showing that more people escaped from police custody this year than from all […]

Stefaans Brmmer SOUTH AFRICA has joined the body of nations agitating for a complete ban on the production, stockpiling, transfer and use of anti-personnel landmines – but campaigners say South Africa should prove its bona fides by legislating a complete ban locally. Jackie Selebi, South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, last week […]

consultants Lynda Loxton THE government is finding that trying to get to grips with the booming consultancy industry is as difficult as wrestling with an octopus. This emerged in the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee when it considered the special report by Auditor General Henri Kluever on consultancy services. The committee heard this week that although […]

Eddie Koch EUGENE DE KOCK’S autobiography, hand-written in his cell, is being kept under wraps by the colonel and his lawyers because it contains deeply personal details about the man who became apartheid’s most ruthless killer. It describes his upbringing in a right-wing family on a plot near Springs. He attended the Baanbreker Primary School […]

Travel and leisure company Aventura looks set to be the first model for restructuring, writes Eddie Koch AVENTURA, the state-owned travel and leisure company, is being primed for privatisation, the culmination of three years of transformation from a loss-maker to a streamlined commercial enterprise. The Department of State Enterprises is planning to complete a draft […]

Lesley Cowling talks to a UCT professor who is introducing the world to new galaxies TONY FAIRALL greets questions on his subject with a wry smile and the deceptive simplicity of a Zen master. When your daily work combines the task of mapping the unimaginable – our universe – and a job as director of […]

For some companies aid is big business, as Robert Lacville discovers on a visit to World-Aid 96 in Geneva ACCORDING to Norway’s Trygvie Nordbye, chairman of the International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), 300-million people are hurt by war, earthquake or famine each year. The 1996 world budget for emergency relief and rehabilitation is $8- […]