Despite being at the end of a hard season, Maria Mutola will be going for a record at the opening of the new athletics stadium in Johannesburg ATHLETICS: Julian Drew WHILE most of the athletes attending the two-day meeting to inaugurate Johannesburg’s new R97-million athletics stadium this weekend are at the tail- end of a […]

SHAUN DE WAAL listens to the music of Isma’l Lo, about to tour SA, and that of his compatriot, Baaba Maal IN the panoply of African music, special honours must go to the west-coast/Sahel countries, chiefly francophone, which have given us their distinctive version of the African sound and such greats as Salif Keita, Mory […]

Some shops at Johannesburg’s airport may be grounded because they are overcharging for their goods, writes Lungile Madywabe SOME duty-free shops at Jo-hannesburg International Airport have been ripping off airline passengers and a shake-up has been pro-mised. Overcharging has been conceded by the Airports Company, the government-owned company which owns all the country’s airports, in […]

With Colin Montgomerie in top form, the experienced European team can wrest the Ryder Cup back from the United States GOLF: Jon Swift THE shift of power — or rather the power to win consistently in top company — from being a wholly owned subsidiary of Golf USA is perhaps nowhere better evidenced than in […]

ATHLETICS: Duncan Mackay THIS season will be remembered as the one when athletics was consumed by a global revolution; the year when you needed an atlas more than a stats book. Never before have so many athletes from so many different countries been so successful. At the world championships, there was a greater spread of […]

Cinema: Justin Pearce Rue Princesse, by Ivorian director Henri Duparc, appears at first like a made-for-television movie. It takes the form of an extended situation comedy with a judicious dose of sticky moments, escapist glamour and mild sexual innuendo — not to mention a happy ending. But its script has an edge to it that […]

Thami Mazwai of the Black Editors’ Forum in The Mark Gevisser Profile Last Saturday night at the Carlton Hotel, while a band trundled tonelessly through a rendition of Stand by Me in the function room next door, Thami Mazwai’s Black Editors’ Forum (BEF) gathered to contemplate its relationship to press freedom, to the white mainstream […]

Karen Harveson Over the next two decades, three-quarters of world trade will take place in the emerging markets, of which South Africa is one. Speaking at a Bell, Dewar and Hall presentation on trade and business in South Africa last week, United States Minister Counsellor for Commercial Affairs Millard Arnold said the US, along with […]

Rehana Rossouw MINERAL and Energy Affairs Minister Pik Botha this week blamed the Strategic Fuel Fund (SSF) for allowing a “rust bucket” tanker — which spilled 66.5 tons of crude oil into the sensitive Saldanha Bay area — to slip through safety controls. The spill, some of which seeped into the Langebaan lagoon reserve, fulfilled […]

Local-content rules will help the industry, writes IBA chair Peter de Klerk in a response to the M&G THE new local-content rules for television are designed to build a South African TV-programme-making industry —so that South Africans can see and hear themselves on our TV screens, and to create jobs in a key industry of […]