RUGBY: Jon Swift THERE is a lot of truth in the old adage that there is no=20 remarks column on the scoreboard. But, with only a four- point edge in the 104 points scored in two warm-up matches=20 against Western Province and Natal, the World Cup squad=20 have some serious thinking to do. There are […]

CINEMA: Stanley Peskin IN Mike Leigh’s Naked, a 27-year-old man comes from=20 Manchester to London. Claiming to be fascinated with all=20 things peripatetic, Johnny (Daniel Thewlis) is unable to=20 find any meaning in or make any commitment to people, life,=20 or any religious belief. In a series of encounters with friends and strangers he=20 meets […]

Ann Eveleth FIVE years, five months and two inquests after assassins snuffed out the lives of Vusi Ngcobo and Bonokhwakhe Gasa, at least 17 other victims of the same attack have descended into abject poverty, with a combined income of less than R200 per month. Ngcobo’s frail elderly mother Khonzaphi suffered two bullet wounds in […]

Jakes Gerwel, the Director General of the President’s Office, is the intellectual, erudite and politically savvy former rector of the University of the Western Cape. He was apparently Mandela’s first choice for Education Minister, but turned it down, insisting he did not want a life in either politics or the civil service. He now has […]

Access to a good education for all remains a crucial issue on the political agenda. Karen MacGregor looks at the battles that lie ahead A bold new approach to financing and organising South African schools is likely to be proposed by the government’s new review committee on school funding and The committee’s crucial task is […]

RUGBY: Jon Swift NOW this country has its one rugby side. And that side — or as many as Kitch Christie can substitute against Natal this Saturday — has one game. There are two schools of thought about what promises to be as hotly-contested an encounter as the President’s XV match against Western Province was […]

THERE is something both sad and courageous about Bert’s Buskers, a Johannesburg skiffle band that contains six of the oldest musicians in the country. Sad because, in the case of their eldest member, 81-year-old spoon-player Gunner Burns, time is getting on; courageous because, despite their age — the average is seventysomething — their capacity for […]

A programme focused on illegal immigrants won an Artes award for investigative journalism this week for Weekly Mail Television producer Harriet Gavshon, and Nicolaas Hofmeyr, who directed the episode. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday was flighted in the Ordinary People series. The programme showed police raids in restaurants and hotels; the deportation of an illegal immigrant; and, […]