The media is not the public. The public knows a media-lynching when it sees one. This little local noise demonstrates the dying power of an old establishment. It used to win quiet victories, but now finds it must raise its voice and then it still fail, says Ronald Suresh Roberts in an interview with the Mail & Gurdian‘s Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.

The Dubai-based consortium that owns Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront offered the provincial government R1,1-billion for the adjacent site of Somerset Hospital before any tender process began and after apparent facilitation by Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool.

The new year has seen a massive upsurge in criminal attempts to extract money from ATMs using explosives, with a startling 23 attacks in January. Eighty-nine ATMs have been attacked by criminals since 2005, according to the South African Banking Risk Information Centre.

Left-wing activists have welcomed the planned launch by the African National Congress of a broad “front for development”, saying it will help restore the party’s character as a mass movement. The ruling party announced after its extended national executive lekgotla last weekend that it was establishing a broad front to “harness the energies and efforts of a broad range of groupings”.

A year-long quest to identify the worst sound in the world ended with top honours going to the backdrop of a market town in Britain on a Saturday night: a person vomiting. The sound won out over fingers being dragged down a blackboard, a dentist’s drill and wailing babies in an online study that drew 1,1-million votes from around the world.

South Africa is protesting to the governments of the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates — among others — which have refused entry to South African citizens with valid visas. It has also stepped in to put a hold on the listing of two South Africans, Farhad and Junaid Dockrat, on a United Nations Security Council watchlist that would effectively freeze assets they have abroad and block any foreign travel by them.

Senior legal advisers this week said the Green Point ratepayers’ association bid to stop construction of the controversial R3,7-billion 68 000-seater Green Point stadium is based on strong arguments and could succeed, in part because the city has failed to submit several independent reports to the public for evaluation.

Authorities in South Africa and Botswana deported more than 140 000 Zimbabweans in 2006, a Herald newspaper report in Zimbabwe on Friday quoted police records as saying. A total of 109 532 Zimbabweans were deported from South Africa in 2006, according to the records. That represents 300 people a day.