Loose cannon: Robert Kirby Sometimes journalists actually do get that whopping Sisyphean boulder to the top of the hill. It takes a great deal of heaving and huffing, but eventually down it tumbles, taking the Emmanuel Shaws, the Jesse Duartes with it. It needed literally dozens of press, radio and television boulders to coax, motivate, […]

Tim Radford It is lunchtime in Europe or breakfast in New England and you are probably in middle life, maybe a great deal older. You are also a chemist, a physicist or a researcher who did something unequivocally important in medicine and physiology. Or you could be an economist, a politician or perhaps a writer, […]

LANSANA FOFANA, Freetown | Friday 10.00pm. DOCUMENTS before the High Court in Sierra Leone show that the brutal civil war in that country was funded by Tripoli and that rebels in Sierra Leone, as well as in other West African countries, recieved military training in Libya. The documents came to light at the trial of […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday 8.00pm. STATE witnesses in the Bronkhorstspriut heist trail were offered cars, houses and salaries to testify, counsel for three of the accused suggested in the Pretoria high Court on Friday. Fifteen men are have pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, attenmpted murder, robbery and car theft. The court heard […]

bus Patrick Bond Last week, while global bureaucratic financial elites had trouble even pretending they possessed the tools to fix the world economy’s cracked engine, some passengers at the back of the bus debated whether to hijack the stalled vehicle or set out on foot. Urgent strategic planning for progressive resistance to globalised finance occurred […]

FRANCOIS CASTERAN, Harare | Friday 7.30pm. HEAVY fighting between Angolan government forces and rebel Unita troops has been reported in northern Uije province, where Unita has surrounded the town of the same name. Uije was the last town taken by government forces before United Nations-sponsored peace accords were signed in Lusaka in November 1994 between […]

South Africa Michael Metelits International research organisation Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) plans to drop Malaysia from its emerging markets free index on November 30, a move which could benefit South Africa. MSCI’s move will increase the weighting of other emerging markets in the index. South Africa has the second largest weighting in the index […]

Tangeni Amupadhi Soweto police believe their “positive attitude” explains their higher conviction record for rape cases compared to their counterparts in other Johannesburg suburbs. Although statistics indicate a pathetic one out of 400 conviction rate for rape cases, a survey on sexual violence conducted in the southern Johannesburg shows Soweto police stations are streets ahead. […]

As the Nobel Prize brings attention to Portuguese literature, Stephen Gray looks at a poet with a South African connection Ten years ago in these pages, Carmel Rickard reported from downtown Durban on the unveiling of a plaque in honour of the centenary of Fernando Pessoa’s birth. This, in turn, was at the foot of […]

Howard Barrell and Stuart Hess Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma has vigorously defended her decision not to allow the state to pay for pregnant HIV-positive women to be treated with AZT, an expensive drug that could reduce the risk of their children being born with the virus. The decision by Zuma and the nine provincial […]