Sitting in his snug log cabin next to the swirling Bystraya river, Alexander explained when he went fishing. "Sometimes we do in the day. Sometimes we do it at night. There’s no set time," he admitted, passing round a tub of mouth-wateringly delicious wild salmon and a chunk of brown bread.
The value of the Zimbabwean dollar suffered its worst crash in memory, dealers said, sparking a run on dollars and forcing stores to close early to put new prices on what little they could afford to stock. ”It’s gone crazy,” said the trader, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his dealings are illegal.
Major Test matches come around so often these days, that it is easy to allow one to slip unremarked into another. But when the Springboks play the All Blacks, the world tends to slow down and this week in Durban was a time for reflection. The last two Tests between these sides at King’s Park were memorable for entirely contrasting reasons.
The Johannesburg Labour Court would on Friday rule whether police service members could join the public-service strike. During arguments on Thursday, lawyers for the police and the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union spent much time arguing which categories of South African Police Services employees were essential and which not.
It starts with a good old-fashioned epic, and ends with one. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about a newspaper magnate, topped a poll of the 100 best films announced by the American Film Institute on Thursday. At the bottom of the list was Ben-Hur, William Wyler’s 1959 spectacle starring Charlton Heston.
President Thabo Mbeki will attend the launch of a book on his governance by Ronald Suresh Roberts at the presidential guest house in Pretoria on Friday. The book, Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, will be launched at 7pm.
Zwelinzima Vavi does not seem to run out of hyperbole to illustrate what is wrong with the government’s economic policies. "It is like a doctor saying an operation has been successful when the patient is dead," he said to great laughter when addressing a youth rally in Mangaung in the Free State last Saturday.
In a rapidly converging telecoms sector, the big question on everyÂbody’s lips is when Telkom will sell Vodacom and who it will partner to re-enter the mobile market. MTN might seem a perfect fit with its large African footprint, but analysts feel the price tag of between R250-billion and R300-billion is too costly for Telkom. The deal would be unlikely to get approval from the competition authorities.
More strikes loom in major sectors of the economy, with labour watchers suggesting that the worker militancy surrounding the public-service strike is feeding into other pay disputes. Strikingly, many of the disputes involve black and white unions.
Forget Freddy Krueger and Norman Bates — here comes Burqa Man. The first serious Pakistani horror flick for a quarter of a century features a psychopath dressed in a blood-soaked version of the traditional garb of Islamic women. Hordes of zombies, including an undead dwarf, add to the gore in the self-financed <i>Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground)</i>.