Bestselling author Kathy Lette recently visited South Africa. MADELEINE WACKERNAGEL met her ONE morning spent eavesdropping in Sandton Square was enough to convince Kathy Lette that her next book had to have a South African element. “What great material! I actually overheard someone saying `Ja well, no fine’!” She describes her discovery of that great […]

RUGBY:Steve Morris THE one surprising aspect of the positive dope tests on several top players is that anyone should be surprised by them having turned up. Northern Transvaal’s Springbok lock Johan Ackermann and the Gauteng Lions pair Bennie Nortje and Stefan Bronkhorst tested positive earlier in the season and now a specimen from Northerns prop […]

Stuart Hess MURIEL JACOBS has received R565 in child maintenance from the government since April last year to look after her two children. The grant, she says is not enough: “I can’t cope with R565, things are getting more expensive. Where must I get money from for everything I need at home?” Jacobs has two […]

Tangeni Amupadhi BRIAN MORROW, the former police officer who blew the whistle on the “Inkathagate” scandal, is a disappointed man. From his home in England he asked the minister of safety and security if he could rejoin the police force because he now feels it is safe to return to South Africa. But he was […]

If playing in the Super 12 is like playing a Test every week, then the matches this weekend are the series decider for three South African teams RUGBY:Steve Morris INTERESTING that South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) supremo, Louis Luyt, would pick this week to espouse his enthusiasm for the Super 12 series. True, Luyt […]

A culture of reckless driving is creating havoc on the roads, but what is the government task team doing to put the taxi industry on the road to recovery? Dawn Blalock reports MPHO MAKHAYA, one month shy of her 17th birthday, is recovering in Leratong Hospital from neck and leg injuries she sustained when the […]

FINE ART: Shaun de Waal ANDREW VERSTER has been busy. One of South Africa’s best-known and most successful artists, it was his exhibition that opened the new Natal Society of Arts Gallery in Durban in May last year. Then he spent a few weeks at the 1996 Grahamstown festival, as artist in residence, in a […]

An internal police inquiry has found a John Vorster Square captain guilty of harassing three colleagues. Ferial Haffajee reports FOR 27-year-old Christine Appelgrein, working for the South African Police Service (SAPS) guaranteed neither safety nor security. Instead, for more than a year, Appelgrein was sexually harassed by a police captain who also abused two other […]

The SA Law Commission has recommended the legalisation of euthanasia in South Africa, a move that could end the suffering of terminal or chronically ill patients Euthanasia could have saved her mother from terrible suffering, writes Ellen Bartlett TEN years ago, on April 10 my mother killed herself. On a sunny morning early in the […]

NOW that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has skirted political disaster over the Bar-On scandal, the focus of attention in the Middle East will shift back to a potentially larger disaster that he has succeeded in generating: deadlock in the peace talks. Like a bull in a china shop, Netanyahu has, in 10 months […]