If a task team’s recommendations are adopted, the Cabinet will continue to decide behind closed doors to whom the arms industry sells. Marion Edmunds reports THE government plans to keep secret its most sensitive arms sales, such as the recent proposed Syrian arms deal, despite calls for greater transparency. A governmental task team will advise […]

THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW IF ever you wanted a walking advertisement in support of legalised abortion, take Glenda Bateman. Fifteen years ago, while working in Johannesburg as a student nurse, she fell pregnant after dating a student doctor for just three months. To put it delicately, it seems a too large condom slipped, and bingo! […]

Gillian Farquhar and Jacquie Golding-Duffy report on whether advertising agents are adapting their creative work in an effort to keep up to date with changes locally THE “new” South Africa born two-and-a-half years ago has brought with it a different set of social and cultural dynamics into the advertising arena. An industry which was predominantly […]

Dennis Mair FOR the next two weeks, Gallery Mau Mau in Cape Town shifts focus from the = ost entation of the art world to the thrill of B-schlock, exploitation filmogra= phy and pure horror. Amid projections and popcorn, administrators David L Dei = and Craig E Parker describe the ensemble as “a terrorism of […]

With the local industry under pressure, South African mining houses are expanding further into Africa, reports Lynda Loxton SOUTH AFRICAN mining houses continue their march into Africa as local mines become more marginal and costs continue escalating. Several speakers this week told the second annual Investing in Mining Conference that local mining companies were increasingly […]

Gustav Thiel BUSINESS is moving – to Cape Town. To establish just how many companies are setting up shop in the Western Cape, and why, Wesgro, the parastatal established in 1986 to promote investment in the region, this week called for a detailed analysis of the trend. Wesgro urban and regional planner Rae Wolpe told […]

Mungo Soggot and Stuart Hess THE records of Cabinet meetings at which some of the most traumatic events of the period before the 1994 elections were discussed appear to have been gutted and sanitised. The records, released to the Mail & Guardian by the National Archives in Pretoria this week, are written in the style […]

FINE ART: Suzy Bell A GERMAN musician from a punk band stared dreamily up at Kali, the dramatic, colourful Hindu goddess who boldly wears a necklace of bloodied male skulls around her neck. In a hash-induced haze, as it was Goa (India) after all, he said: “Look how exciting Indian mythology is. Why is Christianity […]

Top ANC women helped establish the country’s first private deportation camp, reports HEIN MARAIS SEVERAL prominent women members of the African National Congress are linked to a private company running South Africa’s first private deportation camp. The Lindela Accommodation Centre, in Randfontein on the far West Rand, is a central holding point for captured illegal […]

PROTESTS at the inadequacy of South Africa’s stand against crime have become so generalised that they are no longer heard – they are reduced to the drone of the traffic in the street outside. But, at the risk of merely adding to a generalised clamour, some recent events – the theft of an 800kg automatic […]