PAUL EJIME, Durban | Sunday 7.00PM. POLITICAL and security issues, including the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo and global disarmament, especially the situation in Asia, have so far dominated the preparatory meeting of the 12th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Durban. The ambassadors’ and senior officials’ meeting, which was opened early on […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Port Elizabeth | Friday 10.30PM. FEDSURE Medway turned on the turbo when it counted most to win the 1998 Lipton Challenge Cup for the first time on Friday. Co-skippered by Pete Shaw and Steve du Toit, and crewed by Ken Venn, Bruce Keytel and Mike Clarke, the Gordon’s Bay Yacht Club team sailed […]

South Africans are embroiled in both sides of the war in Congo. Khareen Pech, William Boot and Ann Eveleth report South African mercenaries and private military companies swooped into strife-torn Central Africa this week to clinch deals and sharpen the Angolan-led military front in support of the embattled Congolese leader, Laurent Kabila. A Mail & […]

Charl Blignaut `I’m a bit of a tart,” says Marianne Fassler as I settle against a plastic blow-up cushion embedded with pink flowers on a big old chair in her elegently kitsch Johannesburg lounge. “I think I know how to promote myself in the media. Put it this way, I’ve always had good press. But, […]

Swapna Prabhakaran The tale of Cato Manor has always been a tragedy – an old South African tale haunted by the horror of forced removals and the ghosts of families split asunder. Old men remember it with nostalgia as a once special place and a community which was crushed to nothing under the weight of […]

Adam Sweeting CD of the week Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have apparently taken umbrage at the fact that the Pearl Jam song Given to Fly vaguely resembles Led Zeppelin’s Going to California. If anybody’s going to lift chunks from the Zep catalogue, which of course bears no resemblance to the work of any bluesmen […]

Shaun de Waal What the Americans call “sell-thru” video -videos for sale -is beginning to take off in South Africa in a big way. The rampaging success of Disney titles such as The Lion King and The Little Mermaid, which appear to be addictive to children, spearheaded the influx into South Africa of an ever- […]

Gavin Evans General Lothar Neethling has not had a particularly good year; nor such a hot decade either, come to think of it. Previous allegations that he was apartheid South Africa’s poisoner-in- chief have been confirmed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he has emerged as a key player in the former regime’s biological […]

Alex Sudheim `After 10 minutes time you’ll forget you’re watching a screen and you’ll feel like you’re in the same room,” promises Krish Moodley of his unique new venture, the 3-D Picture Palace on Durban’s beachfront. Whether or not you actually want to be in the same room as several dozen grunting, sweating, copulating people […]

Everyone’s talking about Clinton and Monica, but you’d never know it from Britain’s apolitical comics. American stand-up Scott Capurro wonders why When I flew out of San Francisco three weeks ago, Americans were basking in the warmth of an economically glowing summer. But by the time the plane hit the tarmac in London, Monica Lewinsky […]