FRIDAY 5.00PM: SINGER Brenda Fassie jumped over the dock at Friday’s bail hearing for “people’s poet” Mzwakhe Mbuli, as she and 200 other supporters disrupted the hearings until the magistrate walked out. Before the magistrate entered, Fassie demanded — and got — permission to go down to the cells to see Mbuli, who hugged and […]

Melvyn Minnaar If it’s apple you want to drink, go for it. There’s real, virgin apple juice, there’s fabulous, world-famous Appletiser, and then there is apple cider – the hottest, coolest drink in to-be-seen-in bars this summer. The gentrification – or yuppiefication – of cider is a world-wide phenomenon. Winning more and more bright and […]

FRIDAY, 11.00AM: BAFANA BAFANA coach Clive Barker is likely to field a squad that will attack from the first whistle against Germany. He said Bafana Bafana’s skill is the only way to upset Germany. “If we are not creative we will be beaten,” said Barker. “I believe we are stronger than them in a one-on-one […]

Nkosazana Zuma and Louis Luyt are taking pep-up pills from spin doctors Ferial Haffajee It cost a lot, but the R2,8-million which Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma splashed out on improving her image and that of her department is paying dividends. Watch her: there’s a softer touch; less defensive and more confident. The three Bills […]

A dictionary says it has found a new word to represent each of the past 102 years. As if English were so limited. David Rowan and John Ezard report One of Western youth culture’s handiest, most lethal and (till recently) most universal devices of insult happens to be dropping out of the English language. The […]

FRIDAY, 5.00PM IT was a bad Friday for shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with the all share index dropping 139 points or 2,1% to finish the day on 6374. At one stage the market was down more than 3%. The industrial index slid 111 points to 7898, while the financial index plummeted 214 points […]

Melvyn Minnaar Together with vineyard virtuosos like Gyles Webb of Thelema, Beyers Truter of Kanonkop and Norma Ratcliff of Warwick, a new generation of winemakers is gaining more and more attention. At Stellenzicht, originally almost a second label to Neethlingshof, a confident and sometime controversial Andr van Rensburg is making wines for a new era. […]

Black civil servants, traditional leaders and peasants are discovering Northern Province’s cheap source of labour, writes Mukoni T Ratshitanga Hundreds of Mozambican children are working in Northern Province households and on farms for as little as R150 a month. The child workers, some as young as 10, are employed across the province, from Madimbo near […]

Mungo Soggot documents the extraordinary history of the Liberian set to earn R3- million a year in South Africa’s oil industry The Liberian charged with reshaping South Africa’s state oil industry helped cream off millions from his country’s own oil business and had ties with a company which pumped oil into apartheid South Africa. Emanuel […]

From humble beginnings as a worker’s drink beer has become not only respectable, but hip, writes David Shapshak Lazy, hazy sun-filled days, beaches and bare flesh: these are the images that summer and beer conjure up – and rugby, let’s not forget where we are. But beer was once the little people’s drink, the common […]