SARAH BULLEN, Cape Town | Friday 7.45pm THE University of the Witwatersrand on Friday fired Professor Werner Bezwoda for misrepresenting the results of a clinical trial for breast cancer treatment. The trials were conducted on more than 100 indigent black women without their formal consent. Bezwoda was also found guilty because he failed to obtain […]
SWAZI MPs have demanded to know why the State-owned Observer newspaper was closed down three weeks ago. The Observer was closed on February 17 by owners Tibiyo Taka Ngwane after a series of skirmishes with editorial staff. Tibiyo owns the paper on behalf of the Swazi nation, and are strong traditional loyalists. MP Mfomfo Nkambule, […]
SOUTH Africa has agreed to send firefighters to help combat forest fires which have been ravaging tracts of southern Ethiopia for the past 27 days. More than 50000 hectares have been totally destroyed by the fires, which are burning in the Borena and Bale areas, endangering rare wild animals as well as local flora. South […]
KENYAN police on Friday denied that 4,8 tons of hashish they seized in the port city of Mombasa in January has disappeared from a police store. “This not true. The seized drugs are safely in police hands and elaborate arrangements for their security have been put in place to ensure maximum security,” said a statement […]
THE health of former Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, 97, who has been in hospital since Sunday, is improving, officials said. Bourguiba, who led Tunisia’s independence struggle and ruled the North African state for 30 years, is in hospital with an acute inflammation of the respiratory system.
Mail & Guardian reporter Surging oil prices – which may push the cost of petrol to more than R3 a litre by April – have come as an overdue reminder to industrialised countries of just how dependent their economies still are on a single source of energy. And, more to the point, how little they […]
Greg Bowes PREVIEW OFTHEWEEK As if the banging breakbeats of Cut La Roc and Aphrodite weren’t enough, this month you can catch a staggering assortment of international DJs at two not-to-be-missed Gauteng events. The first of these is the Select party at Carfax on Friday March 10. Backed by the French Institute, this is the […]
A new initiative is reviving the creations of a poet and artist whose work ranks among the best from South Africa Michael Gardiner ‘I don’t want to become a campus guru.” This in response to my request to Wopko Jensma for permission to photocopy his poems for my students, necessary because his published work had […]
Ivor Powell Shareholder agreements for the consortium that the South African Telecommunications Authority (Satra) has recommended for the third cellular license could make a mockery of the bid’s claims to promote black empowerment. Analysis of the agreements and founding documentation submitted by the Cell C consortium in support of its bid shows that the bid’s […]
AMAGLUG-GLUG face the Black Meteors in an Olympic qualifier this weekend without defender Aaron Mokoena, midfielder Quinton Fortune and strikers Benni McCarthy and Siyabonga Nomvete after a domestic ruling barring senior national team players from the squad. The under-23 side is trailing in Group B with Cameroon leading 1992 bronze medalists Ghana and South Africa […]
Khadija Magardie The leading United States television news network, ABC, has drafted advertisements for the South African press seeking patients who were part of Dr Werner Bezwoda’s discredited clinical trials into breast cancer treatment. The advert calls on women who were part of Bezwoda’s breast cancer trials at Johannesburg hospital to come forward to tell […]
Aid workers in Sierra Leone are striving to rehabilitate the country’s child soldiers Victoria Brittain Three hundred children spill out across the dusty courtyard, playing ball with homemade bundles, wrestling, running, exuberant. A month ago they were child soldiers with guns and ammunition deep in the bush of Sierra Leone, often wreaking havoc in their […]
They may have only appeared once, but these characters made quite an impression: Poochie: Ill-fated canine addition to The Itchy and Scratchy Show, renowned for habitually “getting biz-zay”. Rabbi Krustofski (pictured below): Estranged father of Krusty the Clown; co- host of radio talk show Gabbin’ about God. God: Briefly endorses Homer’s new religion – based […]
Gregory Mthembu-Salter Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma concluded a four day visit to Burundi on Monday, rounding off a remarkable two weeks of intense South African involvement in efforts to stop this tiny Central African nation’s long-running civil war. The week before Dlamini-Zuma’s visit, former president Nelson Mandela had been in action in Arusha, […]
SANLAM said on Wednesday that it has boosted its headline earnings for the year ending December 31 1999 by 65% to R1955-million. Headline earnings per share amount to 73,4 cents – 26% higher than in 1998. A 26% return on equity has been achieved and Sanlam’s operating profit increased by 39% to R1722-million. Announcing the […]
Neil Manthorp Planning was something that South Africa’s cricket teams weren’t able to do in the past because they had no experience of what they were planning for. It was like packing for a weekend trip to the moon – should you take sandwiches? Does it get cold in the evenings? This time, with three […]
Peter Dickson Still weary from flood relief and mercy missions in Mozambique, South African Air Force (SAAF) helicopter pilots were this week plucking stranded victims from raging river waters in southern KwaZulu- Natal and northern Transkei. Pilots of the SAAF’s Durban-based 15 Squadron rescued 13 pupils and teachers from Riverside Primary in Port Saint John’s […]
Rural women are likely to be the losers under the agriculture ministry’s new policy aimed at creating a class of black commercial farmers Samuel Kariuki The South African land reform programme has the potential of consolidating and expanding South Africa’s fragile democratic gains. But this process also has the devastating potential of fragmenting the vision […]
Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION Can there have been a more gratifying triumph than that of Nando’s over the humourless prissmongers who succeeded in having the now famous guide-dog television commercial canned? God save me from ever praising an advertising outfit, but to Hunt Lascaris I bow my head in honour, especially for the way they came […]
SOUTH African Breweries has received permission from the Indian government to proceed with a $35,3-million investment in a joint venture in Indiay. The joint venture provides for SAB’s investment in Narang Industries Limited, one of India’s oldest industrial houses. The venture — which includes Hallvard Limited, a non-resident Indian investment company — was concluded in […]
Chris McGreal The first sign of life from one of the trees speckled across the vast new lake that is southern Mozambique was an arm thrust from among the leaves. The anonymous limb waved a cooking pot, not with any great vigour, for fear of upsetting the precarious balance of life under the foliage. But […]
Thebe Mabanga The stature of South African musicians is set to be drastically improved. This is if the recommendations of the Music Industry Task Team (Mitt) are successfully implemented. The recommendations are contained in a draft report that has been prepared after a week-long seating for Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Ben Ngubane. […]
floods David Le Page A University of Zululand researcher publicly predicted the dramatic flooding in the Northern Province and Mozambique, but his warnings went unheeded by authorities, particularly dam managers. According to a report published this week by British magazine New Scientist, Mark Jury made his predictions as long ago as September. Jury is currently […]
Barbara Ludman LIFESTYLE Like most beautiful things, berries often promise more than they deliver. In its natural state, a raspberry is an illusion, a wisp of a taste somewhere just past the edge of the senses. Blueberries look bluer than they taste; mulberries aren’t worth the trouble of keeping the juice off your shirt; and […]
BRITISH-BORN supermodel Naomi Campbell jetted into South Africa this week to attend the official launch on Thursday of the new logo and name for the World Motorcycle Grand Prix, Phakisa raceway organisers said. She attended a lunch at the Phakisa hospitality suites tower at Welkom’s Phakisa Freeway with about 400 other invited guests. The first […]
Connie Selebogo Three Senegalese art traders, who claim they were assaulted at the Cradock street market in Rosebank last month by bogus policemen, are due in court next week – not as witnesses but as suspects. The traders, who are being tried on assault charges lodged by their alleged attackers, say the police initially opposed […]
Barry Streek The accrued backlog for the upgrading, maintenance and repair of South Africa’s national roads, excluding provincial and district roads, was estimated at R3- billion at the start of the 1999/2000 financial year, Minister of Transport Dullah Omar has revealed. However, only R775-million was allocated in the 1999/2000 financial year by the Department of […]
Tanzania’s vast plains are home to the world’s most dangerous and most beautiful beasts Stephen Pritchard Africa is a vast gymnasium for the senses. Sight, hearing and smell are given a punishing workout; tired, urban eyes become sharper, ears more alert and noses are offered new, stimulating aromas. Driving across huge landscapes in search of […]
Rupert Neethling Reverse engineering is a digital hot potato. Geeks love it because it lets them study how programming code is put together. Movie moguls hate it because the geeks went and cracked the code that keeps customers from playing Digital Video Discs wherever and on whatever platform they want. The final straw came when […]
US President Bill Clinton has said that Amadou Diallo, the African immigrant whose shooting death by police stirred turmoil in New York, might not have been shot if he had been a white man in a white neighbourhood. Clinton talked about the Diallo case during a White House meeting of more than 150 religious leaders […]
Mark Atkinson SHAREWORLD Nick Leeson may have been a brash, high-risk gambler prepared to bet Barings Bank on a rise in the Japanese stock market but, on the whole, London traders are a shy and conservative breed, according to new research published this week. Based on in-depth interviews with the London staff of four of […]
How 007 could send an unbreakable coded message to Moonraker Michael Brooks In New Mexico the light can be truly astonishing. Not because it gives the desert a strange aesthetic beauty, but because it contains coded messages. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory announced recently that they have written data into single photons, the […]