Marion Edmunds Parliament’s portfolio committees on tourism and environmental affairs have had MPs and senators reaching for their bikinis and sunhats. The committees are spending an estimated R300 000 on study tours abroad to Cuba, Jamaica and Bali. One of Gwen Mahlangu’s first tasks as Peter Mokaba’s replacement as chair of the National Assembly Portfolio […]

in The Mark Gevisser Profile Homeless ‘king of culture’ The depression that sets in, as I take a late- afternoon walk around the Newtown Cultural Precinct with Christopher Till, is not so much a result of the desolation that surrounds me as of the gap between this desolation and its creator’s vision of urban redemption. […]

Marion Edmunds Public Administration Minister Zola Skweyiya has had to bang heads together in the Presidential Review Commission — the body appointed by President Nelson Mandela to investigate transformation in the public service — to get it to do some work. Before this week, the multi-million rand commission met only four times since it was […]

MOTOR RACING: Alan Henry THE Mercedes baby has come of age. Heinz-Harald Frentzen has at last got the drive his ability deserves and has stolen a march on his bitter rival Michael Schumacher by getting it in the best car in Formula One, the Williams. The hiring of Frentzen represents a pre-emptive strike by the […]

FINE ART: Hazel Friedman I’M not sure whether Laura Godfrey-Isaac’s Evolution deserves to be dived into, pigged-out-on or treated like a pimple and popped. But that’s precisely the initial beauty of her (mis)anthropomorphic forms. Depending on a whole host of factors — some of them genetically determined — they can be seen as runny ice-cream […]

JAZZ: Gwen Ansell Forget screams, moans and squishing noises. The sexiest sound in the world is a big fat horn line playing jazz. Irakere, or “The Forest”, last week’s jazz guests for Arts Alive, feature four horns. On saxes, Cesar Lopez provides the intellectual acrobatics and an ironic take on the more florid ballad numbers […]

Mungo Soggot Judges across the country are taking sides in the furious controversy over who is to succeed Michael Corbett as South Africa’s chief justice. In one of the most divisive rows to hit the judiciary since the 1950s, some 100 judges have backed appeal court Judge Hennie van Heerden against Ismail Mahomed — the […]

Alex Brummer in London THE International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to ask shareholders for an increase in its capital base after a sharp deterioration in the Fund’s cash position. Michel Camdessus, the managing director, has indicated that he would like to see the fund’s quotas — the equivalent of its capital base — doubled from […]

The publishing industry has been hit by speculation of a take-over of Finance Week. Mungo Soggot and Peta Thornycroft report The managing director of Times Media Limited (TML), Roy Paulson, this week confirmed he had confronted the editor of the Financial Mail (FM) and TML director, Nigel Bruce, over rumours about an extraordinary scheme to […]

M&G Reporter If Ismail Mahomed does get the post of chief justice, there will be a sweet irony about it when he moves into the office in Bloemfontein. When he appeared before the Appellate Division in his days as South Africa’s first black silk he was forced to flee across the border before dusk in […]