AN electric locomotive pulling 18 goods trucks derailed on Thursday at Rosenegal near Middelburg in Mpumalanga, causing damage of more than R100 million. Police said that the train driver and his assistant were missing. The train was on the way to deliver titanium slabs to Highveld Steel at Witbank when the accident happened at about […]
It’s irritating to be accused of stifling debate while debating. “Aids-denial” scientists are like Holocaust-denial historians. Of course they have a constitutional right to be heard – but Holocaust denial didn’t get cranked up until the 1980s, when every thinking person had known for 40 years that the Holocaust actually happened. Here, the government was […]
John Sutherland George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which was released in South Africa this week, generated so much hype worldwide there was bound to be a backlash. One character, Jar Jar Binks, a computer-birthed frogboy, has been indicted of that most heinous culture crime: racist stereotyping. Jar Jar (created on screen by “animatics”) […]
RESCUE services were searching the sea off Angola’s southwest coast on Wednesday after a helicopter carrying a senior Angolan government official and at least four other people failed to arrive at its destination, an official said. Deputy Interior Minister Dario Ngongo was on board a police helicopter that left Luanda on Tuesday en route to […]
Shaun Harris Taking Stock The latest, long-awaited interest rate cut should have us all ecstatic. The drop in prime and home-loan lending rates from 19% to 18% certainly seemed to please some people, typically those commentators who herald every rate cut, drop in inflation and rise in gross domestic product as the dawn of a […]
Community management of natural resources is all the rage among conservationists. But is it really working, asks Saliem Fakir To promote the sustainable use of natural resources and to maximise benefits for rural communities, several community-based natural resource management projects have been initiated in South Africa, mainly by foreign donor agencies. These projects aim to […]
Shaun de Waal Big-budget movie of the week `See it again!” the Star Wars faithful are urging each other on the Net. “It gets better!” This is partly to ensure that Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace breaks Titanic’s record, but also to help them get over the disappointment of the first viewing. Disappointment […]
John Matshikiza With The Lid Off I met Danny Glover in the Sheraton hotel in Harare in 1986. It was a bitterly cold winter’s morning, the sun had not yet come up, and we were gathering in the lobby of the hotel, waiting to go on to the set to shoot a made-for-TV movie called […]
tennis Sandra Spavins takes a look at a range of recently released books for teenagers The Sanlam Prize for Young Literature and the Young Africa Award continue to encourage new South African writing for teenagers, and the books themselves tackle issues ranging from genetic engineering to sexuality, including stories set in the future or dealing […]
THE Moroccan government has withdrawn permission for the human rights body Amnesty International to hold its annual conference this August in Rabat, Amnesty said on Thursday. Some 400 delegates from Amnesty were to have spent 10 days in the Moroccan capital, the first time that an Arab country had agreed to host the rights body’s […]
Ivor Powell Nosizwe Madlala-Routledge, the newly appointed deputy minister of defence, is no militaristic hawk or securocrat. She’s a self-professed pacifist – and a practising member of the Society of Friends or Quaker movement. She is married to Jeremy Routledge, the director of the Quaker Peace Centre in Cape Town. In the 1980s the centre […]
Talk of healing is premature. There is still so much blood sloshing around that it’s impossible to see the size of the wound, let alone ascertain how best to deal with it. Anyone who has ever had experience of shock or trauma victims will have recognised some of the signs in Hansie Cronje’s team on […]
Mail & Guardian reporter Massi Delle Donne (27) is the first winner of the Mail & Guardian’s MBA scholarship to the Rotterdam School of Management. He met the academic who facilitated the general management study programme, Professor Wil Foppen, in Cape Town earlier this week. Foppen was in town to meet several academics and squeeze […]
The G8 nations have pledged a $100-billion debt relief package. Gary Younge reports from Mozambique, one of the first countries in line for such relief. Julius Nyerere Avenue in Maputo starts on the shores of the Indian Ocean and runs in a more-or-less straight line towards apparent prosperity. The road stretches past the palatial Polana […]
Xolela Mangcu Guest Column Five years ago I invited Sam Nolutshungu and Mamphela Ramphele to Cornell University to discuss South Africa’s prospects for democracy. I remember complaining to Nolutshungu about the overtly political nature of Cabinet appointments in our first democratically elected government. I wanted people to be appointed on the basis of their knowledge […]
The David Gleason Column `There are three kinds of lies,” said British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, “lies, damned lies and statistics.” So, when the South African Statistical Service (SASS)- let it be said with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Finance and, no doubt, the Reserve Bank, too -produces an entirely revised set of […]
Fiona Macleod Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi- Mahanyele is talking about starting a revolution in her second term of office. “We’ve laid the foundations, the building blocks are in place and a social revolution is about to start,” she says. “Our society is changing, and housing is one of the factors contributing towards that change.” […]
Peter Dickson Impoverished rural Transkei faces a “real possibility of famine” unless there is large-scale government intervention, welfare groups warn. Transkei Land Services Organisation acting director Simphiwe Ntshweni says widespread crop neglect and drought in the province is a recipe for disaster. “The government should revive the parastatals and introduce irrigation schemes on a large […]
Marianne Merten Candlelight vigils, marches and prayer meetings may seem insignificant gestures in the face of guns and violence, but for many residents in gang-ridden Hanover Park on the Cape Flats these are the first steps to finding the courage to speak out and act. Hanover Park residents are slowly finding their voice after a […]
Stephen Gray THE DARK STREAM: THE STORY OF EUGENE MARAIS by Leon Rousseau (Jonathan Ball) Eugne Marais, with his passion for the South African wild outdoors, put the Northern Transvaal’s Waterberg district on the map. His memory is still celebrated there. In the Nylstroom library, an alcove is fittingly devoted to his bust (sculpted by […]
Loose cannon Robert Kirby There’s an ancient Australian proverb which runs: “By his piss-up mates shall you know your neighbour best.” Attributed to Dunny the Elder, the wisdom of the saying is self-evident. This appealing fragment of Antipodean social philosophy came rushing to mind when I read in last Sunday’s newspapers that among the host […]
Matthew Krouse, who once portrayed Dimitri Tsafendas in a play, looks at Lisa Key’s extraordinary documentary on the man who murdered Verwoerd I know what it feels like to kill Hendrik Verwoerd. I killed him often in 1985, when I acted as Dimitri Tsafendas in a musical satire I wrote with Robert Colman, who played […]
Mail & Guardian reporter Once you were taught not to take sweets from strangers. A variant of this, which should be drummed into every person with access to the Internet, is not to open e-mail attachments from strangers. In fact, if possible, don’t open e-mail attachments at all unless you’re expecting them. The latest nasty […]
Matthew Krouse Down the tube Across the world the myth about men is the same – apparently we’re out to get laid all the time. Well, yes and no. Yes, we’d like to be engaged in some form of sexual play our whole lives. But no, we don’t fall apart at the seams if it […]
Stephen Bierley Tennis It is an axiom of sport, and particularly tennis, that when a great champion dominates the game, most yearn for a change, and that when the game is in an obvious state of flux everybody yearns for a great champion. For the past 18 months, the only theme running through men’s tennis […]
The appointment of his Cabinet fitted the last pieces into a power jigsaw that will guarantee President Thabo Mbeki control over every level of South Africa’s government, reports Ivor Powell With a full minister of government attached to the Office of the President; a beefed up Cabinet secretariat to co-ordinate and oversee the implementation of […]
The Microsoft trial is back in full swing and just in case you’re feeling sorry for William Gates III, just stop by the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, . Philip Greenspun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology runs a little programme on his site which updates the Spectacled One’s fortune based on the daily price […]
Riaan Wolmarans You’d better shape up, you’d better not cry, you’d better go shop, I’m telling you why … Tidy Trax is coming to town. Yep, the amazingly successful United Kingdom dance label launches an aural attack on our local rave floors at the weekend’s Mother rave, taking place in Cape Town on Friday June […]
Cameron Duodu Letter from the North It is gratifying to learn that Sierra Leone’s President Alhaji Tejan Kabbah is about to bring the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) into his government. There is no doubt that the RUF and its leader, Foday Sankoh, are among the most sadistic murderers on the African continent. […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Wimbledon | Friday 3.30pm. AMANDA COETZER will be relying on wider experience at the top levels of professional tennis when she faces Kim Clijsters in their third round match-up at Wimbledon. Clijsters, at only 16, is highly regarded by many observers, and is barely younger than Jelena Dokic, who sent Martina Hingis packing […]
THURSDAY, 12.15PM: BAFANA Bafana may be out of the World Cup finals, but they have reason enough to hold their heads high, writes ROB DAVIES. The fact that the South Africans qualified for the tournament is testimony to their spirit and their commitment to South African soccer. For a side that has only been playing […]
New Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa’s choice of cabinet has left senior provincial African National Congress members disgruntled, reports Makhosini Nkosi Sevaral high profile African National Congress Gauteng leaders plan to meet this weekend in a bid to secure the intervention of the party’s national leadership to resolve problems that are threatening to destroy the party’s […]