Melvyn Minnaar : Potable pleasures If Dop-en-Dam at one stage suffered an image problem of hairy white legs and powder-blue crimplene safari suits, and Klippies-en-Coke got a bit of a character knock in the theatre, it wasn’t that there was anything amiss with the brandy used for those seriously traditional drinks. Brandy, after all, has […]

Gustav Thiel The Director General of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Rusty Evans, leaves the department he has served for 30 years at the end of the month with a retirement package rumoured to be worth R10-million. He would not disclose how many millions he would get in his golden handshake, except to say it […]

Times In his book, Ascent and Dissent, Ken Vernon asks the unanswerable question: why did the country’s top newspaper never check on the credentials of team leader Ian Woodall? In a review last week, Brian Pottinger, editor of the Sunday Times, fired off a series of missiles at the reporter he assigned to cover the […]

NDABANINGI SITHOLE GUILTY VETERAN Zimbabwean opposition leader Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole was found guilty in the Harare High Court on Friday of plotting to assassinate President Robert Mugabe. He was also convicted of sending men for military training with the purpose of overthrowing the government, and of possessing arms of war. The 78-year-old Methodist cleric, a […]

Three-year rolling Budgets facilitate long- term planning, writes Madeleine Wackernagel Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel has taken all the fun out of Budget day. No more anxious scanning of the Budget book in search of revenue and expenditure targets: they are now freely available for the next three years. Some elements do survive Manuel’s Budget […]

Lizeka Mda If there were still “Whites Only” signs in South Africa, most people would be outraged. Yet practically the whole physical environment in the country says “Able-bodied only” as it deliberately shuts out a fair percentage of the population. Disabled South Africans are denied a full life because they have minimal access to education, […]

Angella Johnson They faced each other like gladiators in the truth commission arena; two battle- scarred adversaries in a fight to decide if the killers of Communist Party leader Chris Hani should be granted amnesty and walk free. The verbal sparring between civil rights advocate George Bizos and the formidable racist grand dame Gaye Derby-Lewis […]

Mail & Guardian reporters The Minister of Minerals and Energy, Penuell Maduna, this week vowed to resign if the Mail & Guardian could provide details of how he came to know about a $10 000 bribe. Maduna has denied any knowledge of how a leading oil trader gave $10 000 to Liberian Emanuel Shaw II […]

Marion Hnsel’s adaptation of Damon Galgut’s The Quarry is being filmed with a precision and organisation that local film- makers could learn from, writes Andrew Worsdale I always have a problem reporting on movie shoots, apart from being envious; everyone keeps telling you good things, you look in vain for some kind of scandal and […]

FRIDAY, 5.00PM: The ongoing bearish sentiment on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, compounded by the continuing crash of the gold price and disappointing economic data, saw 2% wiped off the all share index on Friday, while the gold index followed bullion’s woe’s to lose 3%. At the close the all gold index had fallen 20,7 points […]