Richard Calland

Edwin Castro has many of the typical personality traits of a chief whip, which is the position he currently holds for the Sandinista National Liberation Front. He is warm, charming, mischievous and full of you know what.

The African National Congress is obviously a very well-off organisation: R50 000 is clearly small fry to it. A cheque for this amount was sent to the party by Anglo Platinum in 1999/2000. But the cheque was not banked, it expired.

Small things please little minds they say. Well my favourite moment this political year (so far) was when Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad came to the end of his briefing to the media at the outset of the parliamentary session.

Thank God it’s over. The daily e-mailed "scoresheet", recording the latest tally of NNP "rats", is a thing of the past; the daily gloat from either NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk or his ANC counterparts a footnote of history.

It was hard to tell whether he was kicking him in the shin, or leaning over to pinch his thigh, but whichever it was, Marthinus van Schalkwyk was desperately trying to get Peter Marais to stop talking. It is not an easy thing to achieve at the best of times; and now it is virtually impossible.

The slogan of the University of Louisville is "Dare to be great". Perhaps that is why United States Secretary of State Colin Powell chose it as the venue two weeks ago for what was trailed as the most important statement of American foreign policy for years, perhaps decades.

What can we expect from President Thabo Mbeki next Friday? Wandering down Government Avenue two years ago I bumped into a man who works for the president. It was early morning, the day of the opening of Parliament. Could I get a sneak preview of the state of the nation speech, I inquired?

This Friday one of the most extraordinary of meetings will have just begun. Fidel Castro is the host. The guests: Robert McNamara and president John F Kennedy’s adviser at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Ted Sorenson.

Heading from Kingston towards the sea you can take a route through an area called Olympic Gardens. Few do, unless they have to. It’s a classic Jamaican "garrison": politics and drugs merge with dangerous consequences.

All that was missing was the Number Six on the back. The Green Bok jersey has gone full circle. Thanks to Pieter van Zyl it is now back where it was before Nelson Mandela stooped, gathered it from the gutter of world political opinion, and proudly wore it in the minutes before and after the Rugby World Cup final in 1995.

BMW’s South African workforce produces better cars than its German counterparts. That’s a good story. A very good one, in fact. BMWs roll off the assembly line in South Africa with fewer faults than in Germany itself.

"They have no idea what it’s like; how fucking hard it is for us. They don’t know what the hell we’re talking about when we talk about parliamentary oversight." This intriguing statement was made to me the other day by an African National Congress back-bench MP.

In the same way that rubber-necking men and women are drawn to a car crash, however macabre, there is something undeniably fascinating about the sight of a politician in distress. That was why I went to the Democratic Alliance’s press conference last Thursday.

The new immigration policy is an important case study for our country. For the second time in a row I was greeted at immigration at Cape Town International not just with a smile, this time from a man, but with an identically cheery greeting: "Welcome home, sir."

South Africa’s Constitutional Court is the envy of other nations… Henry Pease sounds like a name conjured from a Victorian, 19th-century novel. In fact, he happens to be the vice-president of the National Assembly of Peru and chairperson of its most important committee, the constitutional review commission.

New York seems to have shrunk in more ways than one. And, though at least one in four cars and homes fly the Stars and Stripes, the impression is that of a muted nation. The recession is hitting Manhattan hard.

Bush’s "war on terror" has provided cover for Sharon’s brand of state terror. As we drove through Ramallah I will never forget how he changed. Jamal, our interpreter. A lean, bookish, quietly spoken man.

Already it is becoming clear that the South African bureaucracy lacks the confidence to see that openness is a friend and not a foe.

The north is, for now, off the president’s back. The e-mail was to the point: "What is your man playing at? Does your government really support this lunatic Mugabe or is this just politics?" This from an old friend in London who gambles other people’s money on the equities market.

Cricket, at least, is transforming strongly. There came a point, over an hour into the afternoon’s session last Saturday, when Makhaya Ntini and Paul Adams began to wilt.