Donna Block SHARE WORLD First birthdays are usually a watershed, a milestone, and reason to celebrate. On January 1 2000 the euro, Europe’s single currency, will have its first birthday, but it appears no one’s going to be coming to the party. The 11 European participants in the euro will not be breaking open the […]

Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH They’ve started it already. According to a Jazz-FM station DJ, who maddens me daily by playing pop instead of jazz, and who interrupts good jazz with idle chatter – I get particularly mad when a guitar solo is truncated – the “product of the century” is the paper clip. […]

Channel vision As we see increasingly often, there’s nothing the SABC television news department enjoys better than leering at someone else’s misfortune. All those loving examinations of dead bodies hanging out of taxis, weeping mothers, body bags, blood- stained teddy bears. Last Sunday evening though, SABC television news excelled its meanest receipts in a sordid […]

The diary of Charlene Smith in the week leading up to the trial of the man accused of raping her A week before the trial, I “crashed”. The police had asked me to give further details of the penetrative acts during the rape, and I did. But it put images back in my head I […]

Barry Streek The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is to give an average of only R3 000 to each of the 16 700 victims of apartheid identified during its hearings. “It is very little,” TRC commissioner Hlengiwe Mkhize acknowledged this week, saying the awards would be merely “symbolic”. “It is simply an acknowledgment of their […]

Howard Barrell OVER A BARREL What a relief to discover that the Democratic Party may also be led by a bunch of venal, ambitious, self-serving bastards; that, in the very best traditions of politicians the world over, some of its leaders may also now know how to waken the dead when they need a few […]

Movie of the week Arnold Schwarzenegger has never been better than when he played a cyborg-assassin in The Terminator, and he has never been in a better movie. Subsequent attempts to extend his action career, in films such as The Last Action Hero and True Lies, were comparatively unsuccessful; attempts to develop his persona with […]

Andy Capostagno WHO IS … ERNIE ELS? Ernie Els comes back to earth this week. Els plays in the Players Championship at Royal Cape for a total purse which is less than a third of what he won alone at the Nedbank Million Dollar Challenge last week. The Players Championship is the start of the […]

Khadija Magardie One of the leading lights of the Commission for Gender Equality, Dr Farid Esack, has thrown his weight behind deposed chief executive Colleen Lowe-Morna, who is bringing an urgent interdict to overturn the commission’s decision to fire her. In affidavits before the Johannesburg High Court, Esack has also called for an inquiry into […]

Paul Kirk As South Africa braces itself for a malaria epidemic, health experts are warning that a run on anti-malaria drugs may leave people defenceless against the killer disease. It emerged this week that pharmacies across the country are reporting fast- shrinking supplies of over-the-counter anti-malaria drugs, with several outlets in malaria hot spots having […]