Belinda Beresford Careless use of your credit card could mean you are making your bank an interest-free loan. If you fail to pay your total credit card debt each month, your bank may charge you for the full outstanding amount – even if you have made a partial payment. Say your statement says you have […]

Howard Barrell : Over a Barrel One of our stranger habits as South Africans is to imagine the rest of the world owes us a living. It is not a feeling many readily admit to. It is more an underlying conviction which governs much of our political and economic behaviour. We did once represent a […]

It’s written in the stars, but only the experts can read it, and not everybody believes it. Jane Rosenthal visited astrologer Rod Suskin The day I made an appointment with Rod Suskin, I did not know that my father would die (I knew he was sick) and nor did I know that a devastating forest […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kuala Lumpur | Thursday 9.00pm. FIFTH-year medical student Frantz Kruger took Games silver in the discus on Thursday night, in the Bukit Jalil Stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Kruger, hot from a personal best throw of 65,73m at the International Athletics Federation World Cup in Johannesburg, threw 63,93 on his sixth throw to come […]

Jim McClellan There has been no shortage of books about computers over the past few years. Politicians, academics and journalists have all spun out utopian or dystopian techno- visions. But programmers – the people responsible for making this technology work – haven’t produced any grand globe-spanning theories about the heaven or hell on Earth they […]

Chiara Carter Achmat ”Boeta” Davids, Cape Town community worker, writer and academic, was the first cultural historian to reclaim Afrikaans as a language of the slaves rather than the colonisers. Davids died of a heart attack at the Muslim radio station Voice of the Cape earlier this week and was buried from Cape Town’s Long […]

Fiona Macleod Criminal charges will soon be laid against animal dealer Riccardo Ghiazza, who recently kidnapped 30 baby elephants from the Tuli bushlands in southern Botswana. Ghiazza is holding the elephants near Hartebeespoort Dam, with the intention of selling them to zoos and animal trainers. Rick Allen, manager of the wildlife unit of the National […]

Sudan is suffering the worst famine in its history. And it is caused not by drought but by civil war. The aid agencies are pouring in relief, which enables the combatants to carry on fighting. Kevin Toolis argues that Western governments should call a halt to a policy that’s failed There was no song in […]

Larry Elliott : A Second Look The Great Fire of London began in Pudding Lane and raged uncontrollably for days. When the flames died down, large parts of London had been reduced to smouldering heaps of ash. With the benefit of hindsight, the Great Fire was not a disaster. London recovered quickly and the authorities […]

Mark Coetzee : On show in Cape Town Dr Gotz Adriani, in his Joseph Beuys catalogue essay, states that, ”It was not without reason that [Beuys] denied his materials and demonstrations, and even his monuments, any form of permanence.” This exhibition not only demonstrates this point, but unfortunately denies any adequate representation of the artist, […]