Six-and-a-half years later and R55-million richer, one diamond player has made its fortune, reports Bronwen Jones Foreign investors have given another much needed capital injection into the economy with the purchase of one of South Africa’s 2 500 diamond mining concerns. The Canadian-based, but Bahamas-registered, Becksham Coporation recently acquired Messina Investments for R68,52-million. Becksham has, […]

Scientists gathered in Grahamstown this week to discuss the invisible world around us. Lesley Cowling reports MALARIA was the disease that in colonial times led to West Africa being dubbed “the white man’s graveyard”. The discovery of the white powder that put a check on it – quinine – helped the European powers to conquer […]

Independent auditors have been called in to examine the Educational Opportunities Council’s accounts, following reports of mismanagement, writes Andy Duffy ONE of the country’s top funding organisations for students has been hit by allegations of mismanagement, with its chief accused of lending donors’ cash to her closest friend. The Educational Opportunities Council, which channels about […]

BASKETBALL: Ian Katz TO the uninitiated spectator, basketball often seems like a game in which scoring points is simply too easy. With teams typically sinking more than 40 baskets per game, individual feats of brilliance tend to get lost in a blur of attacks and counter-attacks. There is hardly time to savour a gravity-defying dunk […]

The violence-torn taxi industry is slowly changing, reports guest writer Pippa Green.

GRAPES and wine contain a natural antidote to cancer, a discovery that could help explain the so-called ”French paradox” – the lower rates of heart disease and cancer of nations like France, Italy and Spain. John Pezzuto, of the Illinois College of Pharmacy in Chicago, and other scientists report in the American journal Science that […]

CHRIS ROPER loves the production but resents the author of The Winter’s Tale Will Shakespeare peers smugly out of the homely imported foliage that flanks the Maynardville audience, his honest Englishman’s brow softened by the silvery uplight strategically placed to keep him visible throughout performances of his masterworks. Big Bard is watching you, but the […]

Mungo Soggot A SUPREME Court judge has been reported to the chief justice after ordering a leading campaigner for gender equality to adopt her husband’s name before he would grant her a divorce. Loretta Jacobus, the African National Congress MPL who chairs Gauteng province’s committee on gender equality, says she was stunned and “disgusted” when […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy speaks to the people behind the sweeping changes in current affairs programmes The launch this week of a new current affairs programme – Question and Answer (Q&A) – marks the revamp taking place within the SABC’s television news department. It has taken the new head of SABC-TV’s Current Affairs division, Sarah Crowe, less […]