One of the greatest things the local science and technology industry has going for it is its people. Lesley Cowling reports STATISTICS released this month confirm what South African scientists and engineers have long suspected: they work in difficult circumstances, no one understands them and they are brilliant. The Foundation for Research Development’s recently published […]

Marion Edmonds POLITICAL parties are anticipating a review of the Constitution next year, leading to future amendments to the text, finalised by the Constitutional Committee this week. Both the National Party and the Democratic Party say they will take the opportunity of a review next year to change the clause which prohibits parliamentarians from crossing […]

Britain is once again eyeing South Africa as a market for some major defence machinery, reports Stefaans Brmmer SHOULD Cabinet decide to buy four second- hand submarines from Britain – at the bargain price of R2-billion – it may well find the deal to be a sweetener. London is hoping the cheap subs will soften […]

and terror Rehana Rossouw EVERY morning, the mother of a seven-year- old girl watched her daughter leave their Khayelitsha shack to walk to school. Most mornings, the child left home with an empty stomach. For the past few months the child hadn’t reached school. Instead, she had been going to a house nearby where she […]

HAZEL FRIEDMAN meets the Springbok Nude Girls, the Boland rockers set to share a stage with Bjork BOY toys for the thinking babe, Nineties musos sans machismo, in touch with their feminine sides and all that crap. That’s just some of the hype surrounding the Springbok Nude Girls – a band that was born only […]

Cape Town is now Boss Models turf. CHRIS ROPER watched the launch BOSS Models launch, Hemmingway’s, October 3, 1996. I arrive at 9pm “Cape Town time”, as the press release requested. A large crowd mills around at the entrance stairs, kept back by a token velvet cord and three large bouncers in equally token black […]

Eugene de Kock’s evidence in mitigation of his sentence this week centred on his background and childhood, reports Eddie Koch THAT the 1980s bush war in Namibia and Angola was South Africa’s Vietnam, a turning point in our history that left its mark in many different ways on the psyche of a generation of young […]

HAZEL FRIEDMAN went to two exhibitions that explore the latent art of historical documentation SO many stories to be told. So few ways of really telling them. This is the conclusion some viewers will draw after seeing Roger Meintjies’s visual essay on the Suez/Aida Project and Chinchona Project. Now don’t get me wrong. Meintjies, a […]

A healthy dose of chutzpah could transform the civic organisation into a leading empowerment company, writes Mungo Soggot THE South African National Civics Organisation (Sanco) has stopped throwing stones and is going into business. The radical anti-apartheid civic organisation is poised to move into the heart of capitalism when it branches out into direct insurance, […]

THE new Russian threat is no longer the massive weight of the Red Army but its pitiful weakness, while the enfeeblement of the Russian leadership is no less alarming. There is a sense of governing by mirrors as President Boris Yeltsin reassures the nation from his hospital bed. To be really heartened by the message, […]