WHAT’S NEW Missing toddlers and truanting teenagers could soon be things of the past with the development of a revolutionary satellite tracking system which willenable parents to keep an eye on their children 24 hours a day. A tiny gadget called KidBug will enable parents to monitor the movements of their children – and the […]
David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY The best chance of some degree of immortality nowadays would appear to lie with the hope of being dug up by a palaeontologist. It is a prospect which troubles me for various reasons including concern that one day they will find my skeleton and will speculate about my life without taking […]
Paul Kirk A top official in the Department of Home Affairs and one of Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s closest aides has been raped in her Ulundi home. The official, who has asked not to be identified, was surprised in her home by a single attacker who, after severely assaulting her and tying her up, raped her […]
Grant Shimmin BOWLS If the World Bowls 2000 tournament, which draws to a close with the singles final at Marks Park, Johannesburg, tomorrow afternoon, has achieved one thing, it’s to dispel to the casual observer the image of the sport as “old man’s marbles”. To the ardent follower, the presence of a healthy crop of […]
The squeaky-clean captain of South Africa has thrown the game into chaos. I’m not entirely bowled over Matthew Engel It was, as one sage put it this week, as if Queen Elizabeth had been caught fiddling her taxes. If anyone was making a book on the next cricketer to be exposed in a betting scandal, […]
Hazel Friedman’s new book about Norman Catherine uncovers his unique conceptual space ‘Twas a dark and stormy night …” Actually it was nothing of the kind last week when Norman Catherine celebrated 30 years of artistic output with an exhibition and the launch of the book Norman Catherine. One almost felt that at any moment […]
Grant Shimmin HOCKEY The South African Hockey Association (Saha) has decided to appeal to the executive board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in an attempt to overturn the exclusion of their men’s side from the Olympic team for Sydney. The decision is an indication of their determination, in the words of president Clare Digby, […]
Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola, the three giants of cellular phones, this week joined forces to create a standard for delivering secure transactions on mobile handsets by 2001. The move is designed to fuel the rise of mobile commerce, such as banking or buying train tickets with a cellphone – a process the three companies say […]
Johann Kirsten CROSSFIRE Concerns about the viability and justification of the new approach to land reform by the Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, Thoko Didiza, have been raised since she announced her new approach in February. But Didiza’s new approach is an appropriate intervention when one considers that the land reform programme went off […]
The pharmaceutical goldrush triggered by Viagra has forced female sexual dysfunction out of the bedroom and into the market place Maureen Rice Viagra started it. When the drug went on sale in 1998, it changed the sexual landscape as significantly as the birth control pill. Suddenly men were talking about their impotence in public and […]
Byzantine world of cricket betting Vikrant Gupta and V Krishnaswamy in New Delhi When Hansie Cronje, or the Australians Mark Waugh and Shane Warne before him, tell us that they only “provided information and forecasts” and did not indulge in “match- fixing”, they fool only the naive. In fact, this “inside” information gives the bookie/punter […]
Ryan Coetzee CROSSFIRE When the Democratic Party first released All Power to the Party, a description and analysis of the African National Congress’s Cadre Policy and Deployment Strategy, many major newspapers simply ignored it. The one publication that devoted an editorial to the document rejected our analysis and, bizarrely, pronounced us “guilty of McCarthyism” for […]
Dermot Bolger has been pushing Irish literature for decades. Now his anthology of it has been expanded Nicholas Wroe Dermot Bolger wasn’t the only teenager with literary pretensions growing up in 1970s Dublin, but surely no others have had such a lasting influence on the modernisation of Irish literature. Instead of scribbling some embarrassing verse […]
the doldrums Donna Block The political turmoil surrounding the Zimbabwean government is on the brink of destroying the country’s economy. The second most powerful economy in Southern Africa after South Africa has been plagued by crisis after crisis, which has more recently been made worse by the invasion of white-owned farms by veterans of the […]
Khadija Magardie and Rachel Kelly Dr Werner Bezwoda, South Africa’s leading chemotherapist who admitted to misrepresenting research into breast cancer, has escaped censure from the Gauteng government after the province’s health department bungled its probe into the scandal that has rocked the medical world. Bezwoda, who was last month dismissed by Wits University’s clinical oncology […]
The leader of the IFP, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, has been hit with yet another scandal Paul Kirk Government intelligence agencies have been probing allegations that Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the minister of home affairs and president of the Inkatha Freedom Party, has been receiving large amounts of cash from illegal casinos. According to confidential documents compiled by the […]
GALE-force winds off flood-battered Mozambique are expected to pound the southern coast and adjacent interior with up to 50mm of rain on Thursday, the South African Weather Bureau reports. It said the subtropical low-pressure system over the Indian Ocean could develop into a cyclone by Friday. Bureau spokesman Ewert Scholtz said it is quite late […]
Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH The British media have gone totally overboard over the Zimbabwe issue. No doubt because of President Robert Mugabe’s intemperate use of language – especially his unwise homophobic remarks, among others – he is being portrayed in a manner akin to the treatment received by Idi Amin of Uganda in […]
Tim Radford United States chemists and engineers have developed a polymer which could trigger another revolution in computing and communications – and bring Star Trek-style 3D hologram fantasies a step closer to reality. Using the new material, they promise an “opto-chip” that will process signals at 100 gigabytes a second. This is the equivalent of […]
Charlotte Denny Resumption of global trade talks seems unlikely following the failure of the latest attempt at compromise. Hopes that concessions to the world’s poorest countries will revive the talks were dashed this week when the big four trading powers refused to open areas of their markets. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) had backed tariff-free […]
Ronald Suresh Roberts CROSSFIRE The Mail & Guardian abandoned its sassy and irreverent best self last week, instead offering readers an editorial full of artless bombast (“The M&G’s not for burning”). Why? According to the editorial, some participants in the Human Rights Commission (HRC) media hearings have defamed all whites as “intrinsically guilty of racism”, […]
SOUTH Deep gold mining joint venture said on Wednesday it has suffered a number of infrastructure problems that have affected production in the first quarter of the year. But a spokesman said this will not prevent the joint venture from reaching its targets for the year. “The incidents were serious in that they impacted our […]
Liberia’s most famous export is not only great on the pitch, but a good guy off it Amy Lawrence It was an average Sunday afternoon. Semi- comatose on the sofa, half an eye on the Italian football on television. It was AC Milan versus Verona, nothing special, until with a couple of minutes to go […]
The beauty of the game of cricket lies in its complexity, of which one becomes acutely aware when facing the difficulties of explaining the game to a newcomer. “It’s like baseball with two hitters,” is a familiar starting point, “except the ball bounces.” Ah, but what permutations lie behind that small qualification … The terror […]
The South African government wants Anglo American to hand over land containing substantial platinum deposits Jaspreet Kindra and Belinda Beresford The Department of Mineral and Energy Affairs has asked Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) to return the mineral rights to 24 platinum-rich farms located in the former Lebowa territory in Northern Province. Amplats, the world’s largest […]
After 24 years of vicious abuse at the hands of her husband, justice may finally be done for Anne Ribets Charlene Smith Anne Ribets is tiny and well groomed. Her appearance belies the fact that for 24 years her husband – now ex-husband – has regularly beaten stabbed and attacked her. He once allegedly abducted […]
PAUL KIRK, Johannesburg | Friday 11.00am. GOVERNMENT intelligence agencies are probing allegations that Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the minister of home affairs and president of the Inkatha Freedom Party, has been receiving large amounts of cash from illegal casinos. According to confidential documents compiled by the National Intelligence Agency, Buthelezi has more than R4-million in his personal […]
Racked by war and a famine that sucked up Live Aid funds in 1985, Ethiopia faces starvation again Jason Burke As the desert sun began to dip towards the hot horizon, Bashir Ahmed Abdi died. The three-year-old had spent his last day unconscious in a tiny hut, in the middle of a barren, red-earthed plain. […]
Barry Streek The proposed merger of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and the South African Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (Satra) has been changed to ensure that the new body, now to be called the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), has constitutionally entrenched independence. The Democratic Party’s Dene Smuts said the amended Bill recognises the […]
hearted Donna Block SHAREWORLD I can’t go anywhere these days without someone, anyone, asking me about the stock markets. It’s like they’re having a love affair with shares and all they want is to get more and more information and get involved on one exchange or another. But love affairs, like share prices, are precarious […]
Anthony Browne Directors of BP Amoco, the world’s largest oil producer, will this week face a revolt by shareholders who want investment diverted to renewable energy. The annual meeting will vote on a groundbreaking resolution urging the firm to abandon its Northstar oilfield in Alaska and reinvest the money in solar power. The resolution was […]
MPUMALANGA’s department of education fired two high-ranking officials on Thursday for their involvement in the 1998 matric scandal in which results were fraudulently inflated to 72%. Former examination head, Gogo Ndlovana, and first education specialist, Kate Mokone, were fired upon the recommendation of Professor Papa Maithufi who headed an internal investigation into the scandal. Maithufi […]