Friday night : Charl Blignaut It’s Friday night and you’re driving through Pretoria – the new, improved Pretoria. If it weren’t for the lingering scent of Jacaranda blossoms, you’d hardly recognise the place. There are trendy cafs and happy, shiny people where once were butch Tukkies engineering students with bad hairstyles. (Once I witnessed a […]

John Naughton There is a saying in the computer business that “only the paranoid survive”. The man who has taken it most to heart is Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The pace of change in the computing industry is such that if you blink you might not spot the threat. Gates blinked spectacularly in 1994, when Netscape […]

The Springbok onslaught has already drawn blood in the UK. Will Wales be able to stop the flood? Andy Colquhoun reports from London New coach Graham Henry has been portrayed as Welsh rugby’s “great redeemer” in a controversial advertising campaign which borrows from the words of a popular hymn. But the bright young things in […]

Creating an “inner policeman” was how Minister of Justice Dullah Omar described the moral code South Africans needed to develop if corruption was to be weeded out. Given the extent of the rot in the justice system as well as other government departments, Omar’s metaphor was less than apt, but delegates to this week’s government […]

Andrew Muchineripi : Soccer It was not a pretty sight for those wearing black and white. Orlando Pirates, who had not lost to Kaizer Chiefs since the Premier Soccer League was formed two years ago, were being teased and tormented. There were 15 minutes left in the first leg of the Rothmans Cup semi-final, Chiefs […]

deliver? In the second report of his seven-part series on transformation, John Matisonn looks at the financial problems that confronted the ANC when the party took over government The South African Airforce helicopters flew past the Union Buildings bearing the new flag in salute to President Nelson Mandela. Jet fighters streamed through the sky trailing […]

Alex Brown The 1998/9 Spier Summer Festival opened last week with a bit of a bang, and a bit of whimper. The bang was the sold-out amphitheatre, and the big name Spier scooped: David Helfgott, the Australian pianist on whose tormented life the film Shine was based. The whimper was some patchy play from Helfgott; […]

Mail & Guardian reporter The Human Rights Commission (HRC) has thrown out a complaint of subliminal racism laid against the Mail & Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers by the Association of Black Accountants and the Black Lawyers Association. The request for an investigation was turned down “because the issue of racism in the media is […]

Angella Johnson : VIEW FROM A BROAD Sophia Jardim was trawling the aisles of her local supermarket, one of her “children” precariously balanced on her hip, when a woman approached and lobbed a gob of spit at her. It was just another in a string of unpleasant attacks this 43-year-old divorcee has had to endure […]

Lauren Shantall A B-grade Barbie-rella babe in a yellow polka dot rubber bikini steps s on to the stage. Armed with a hairdryer-cum-ray gun she begins to blow up a flaccid yellow blob while the soundtrack blares a kooky, surreal mix of Plan Nine From Outer Space meets Mars Attack on an operating table. As […]