Ferial Haffajee The SABC board chair, Professor Paulus Zulu, may have acted unilaterally in sacking deputy chief executive Govin Reddy. Some board members sought a negotiated parting of the ways instead of the immediate termination of employment which Zulu penned in his July letter to Reddy. His action has exposed the SABC to a very […]
Ferial Haffajee Tensions in the Midi TV consortium have come to a head because major shareholders vetoed an attempt by the board’s chair to secure a highly paid job at the station. Nomazizi Mtshotshisa has lobbied hard to become full-time executive chair, with an annual salary of over R400 000. Her efforts were shot down […]
Asian turmoil is hitting luxury goods in the wallet … and the handbag and the shoes, writes Sarah Ryle Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous might have said: “You can never have too many accessories.” If only it were true. The sad reality, from the viewpoint of fashion’s most prestigious houses, is that when the economic climate […]
Damian Daniels A Second Look Within days of the deadly attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, terrorism with an international dimension has escalated the levels of violence in Cape Town with the bomb attack on Planet Hollywood at the Waterfront. Months earlier a spate of pipe-bomb attacks on the homes […]
side of the moon There’s an ugly side to the fairest Cape, writes John Matshikiza There’s a startling image that always strikes you when you fly into Cape Town.The same thing must have struck Vasco da Gama and Jan van Riebeeck as they approached it from the sea; that extraordinary relationship between an immovable object, […]
Andrew Worsdale The first movie I ever saw was Swiss Family Robinson at the Greenway cinema in Greenside and I vividly remember sleeping most of the way through it, waking up for an instant to see a giant python slithering down a tree, and then I burst into tears. Thirty-something years later I feel like […]
Karlin Lillington California may this week give Internet service providers (ISPs) the strongest legal weapon yet in the battle against “spam” – the unsolicited mass e-mail advertisements detested by Internet users – allowing them to sue for $25 000 in damages a day. But in an odd political twist, the United States federal government is […]
Alex Sudheim `Make sharp, the picture is on!” yells the usher to the throng of patrons still jostling for popcorn and cooldrinks around the kiosk. Behind him, the 400-seater cinema is packed to capacity as the enormous screen flickers into vivid life. Its a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon in a deserted and windswept Durban city […]
fi Amelia Gentleman Music lovers could soon be free to dispense with cumbersome multi- stacking CD players in favour of pocket-sized devices smaller than credit cards, christened the My-fi. Promoted as the world’s smallest hi-fi, the British-designed machine can play music downloaded from a CD player or direct from the Internet. The music is stored […]
The massacre of species at present rates has baleful consequences for Earth, writes Tim Radford A big fish is about to swim away, forever. The barndoor skate, Raja levis, seems close to extinction. In 1951 research ships found it in 10% of all trawls of the St Pierre Bank in the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland. […]
Cecil John Rhodes’s bones are in danger of being tossed in the Zambezi, writes Mercedes Sayagues Few places are as charged with spiritual energy as the Matopos hills in Zimbabwe. Granite boulders twist into contorted sculpture, thorny vegetation is splashed with flowers and 20 000-year-old San paintings adorn caves. This is the place to touch […]
Alex Sudheim On show in Durban Around 10 years ago in Pretoria, architect William Raats was looking at an Australian magazine which featured modern buildings decorated with beautiful Aboriginal art works. He thought to himself: “If only we had something like that here,” upon which he promptly realised that of course we do – and […]
The level of government pension funding may be cause for concern, writes Mike Metelits The level of funding of government employee pensions, along with the method of paying for these obligations, may be distorting how foreign investors look at the level of indebtedness of South Africa, and thus how they rate our future prospects and […]
Maureen Barnes The prime minister of Malaysia – Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to give him his full title – got into a helicopter on one of his frequent inspections of his country and, flying over a remote area of designated protected forest, he saw evidence of illegal logging. In a fury, he flew back […]
Eddie Koch Conservation authorities are so worried about tuberculosis (TB) in buffalos that they are preparing to shoot thousands of the animals in Lowveld game reserves. Rangers in KwaZulu-Natal’s Hluhluwe Umfolozi Park have already begun culling infected animals. Thousands of buffalo in the Kruger Park have been infected by TB, originally spread by domestic cattle […]
Iden Wetherell He is being compared to Britain’s combative wartime leader Winston Churchill in local media tributes which border on the hagiographical. But whether this proves to be President Robert Mugabe’s finest hour ultimately depends on the outcome of the war he is busy directing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a decision that […]
Stewart Dalby Spending it It used to be said that television would see an end to newspapers, but newspapers are still with us. Similarly, the computer was supposed to herald the paperless society. What use pens, then? In fact, pens are very much with us and vintage fountain pens are now highly valuable and collectable […]
You may be surprised to learn that Africa’s stock exchanges have outperformed most other emerging markets in the year to date in dollar terms – and that’s despite war in the Congo, bombs in Kenya and Tanzania and the general perception of the continent as a haven for corruption and chaos. You may be further […]
KZN fraud probe Wonder Hlongwa Senior government officials in KwaZulu- Natal could soon face prosecution for their alleged involvement in a fraudulent cheque scam involving millions of rands. The province’s deputy attorney general, Chris de Klerk, said the police investigation into the matter is finished. Police have told him they will hand him the docket […]
Robert Kirby ONE MIRACLE IS NOT ENOUGH by Rex van Schalkwyk (Bellwether) About a quarter of the way through Rex van Schalkwyk’s very disquieting book I had moments of a curious temporal shift. So much of what I had been reading could well be the Kafkaesque testimony presented to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of, […]
Carolize Jansen The Sports Information and Science Agency conducted an extensive and enlightening study on the participation of women in sport last year. The main objectives of the study were to obtain the number of women participating in various sports in South Africa, segment the number of these participants in categories according to, for instance, […]
SARAH BULLEN in Johannesburg | Thursday 2.30pm. BLACK CLOUDS are gathering over the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on Thursday as Wednesday’s 6,2% fall has accelerated, with 8,55% wiped off the market by 2.00pm. With the contagion of what is being termed the ‘Russian flu’ hitting global emerging markets, the price of local stock is falling with […]
MICHAEL METELITS, Johannesburg | Thursday 7.00pm. The JSE was hammered again by the Russian market and the effect it’s having on investor sentiment about emerging markets. The all share dropped 314 points to close at 5218, while industrials plummeted 387 points to finish at 6106. Financials, tied closely to the debt and currency markets, haemorrhaged […]
JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Thursday 6.00pm. SOUTH Africa’s top corruption investigator, Judge Willem Heath, has been asked to investigate senior Mpumalanga Parks Board directors and officials for corruption after they allegedly issued irregular promissory notes to a series of international financial institutions. Mpumalanga Premier Mathews Phosa confirmed in a statement to African Eye News Service […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday 8.30pm. SECURITY officials assigned to the Non-Aligned Movement summit to be held in Durban at the weekend on Thursday warned people to be wary of bogus convention co-ordinators who are issuing false invitations and accreditation cards. Police said on Thursday that people masquerading as co-ordinators are issuing fraudulent documents for […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday 3.30pm. THE South African under-14 tennis teams competing in the NTT World Junior Tennis Final in Nagoya, Japan got off to a good start on Wednesday, with each team managing to beat one of the seeded teams. The boys’ team of Izak van der Merwe, Craig Smith and Shaun Ellison […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Thursday 11.00PM. ZIMBABWEAN soldiers have started to return home from the Democratic Republic of Congo — in body bags. The state-controlled media on Thursday reported that two Zimbabwean soldiers had been killed, three were missing and 15 injured following a rebel attack on Kinshasa, the DRC capital city, this week. However […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 10.00pm. A LOBBY of labour, sport and business groups on Thursday threatened to apply for an urgent court order forcing Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma to withdraw the Tobacco Products Control Amendments Bill because they say it is unconstitutional. The Bill is due to be tabled in Parliament on Monday. The […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kigali | Thursday 9.00PM. FIGHTING continued in the Democratic Republic of Congo capital, Kinshasa, on Thursday after rebel forces determined to topple President Laurent Kabila infiltrated the city. The allied forces backing Kabila appear to have maintained a hold on the city one day after fierce artillery battles broke out in the eastern […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 9.00pm. DALY’S Insurance sailed superbly on the fifth day of the Lipton Challenge Cup in Algoa Bay on Thursday, scoring their first victory and the overall lead going into the final day on Friday. In their eagerness to get off to a good start on Thursday the entire fleet was […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday 8.30pm. THREE people have been detained for questioning in connection with Tuesday night’s bombing at Planet Hollywood in Cape Town in which one person died and 27 were injured. Detective-Superintendent John Sterrenberg told the eM&G that police, responding to an anonymous tip-off, detained a man and two women as […]
SARAH BULLEN in Johannesburg | Tuesday 6.00pm. SOUTH Africa is experiencing a slowdown in economic activity, with economic growth weak and the current indicator of employment in the formal sectors of the economy having declined to its lowest level in nearly twenty years, was the word from Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals on Tuesday. Announcing […]