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 […]
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 […]
scoundrels? In the course of researching this article, I telephoned a former colleague in London who is responsible for organising much of the foreign coverage on an international financial publication. I have often used him as a sounding- board for ideas and arguments, and I asked his thoughts on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). He was […]
Matthew Krouse Johannesburg’s Newtown cultural precinct’s rather tarnished image as the social hub of the great African city has been amply lambasted. Suburbanites now bypass the city centre, believing it has fallen apart – especially Newtown, with its derelict buildings crowded with squatters, revelling township drunkards and stoned teenage ravers. So a visionary new scheme, […]
off air Ferial Haffajee Just as viewers were starting to get used to presenter S’bu Khumalo doing his cool and chatty thing on Sunday nights, the long-awaited television arts programme, aRt, has been taken off air. aRt played out for the last time on Sunday night and will be replaced in October by a new […]
Adam Mars-Jones GUT SYMMETRIES by Jeanette Winterson (Granta) This novel (now in paperback) from a commendably retiring writer – it is known that she doesn’t read reviews of her work – repeats a number of themes from previous books:the deathliness of habit and the everyday, sexual triangles, a city viewed as phantasmagorical, the serviceability of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Shaun de Waal What the Americans call “sell-thru” video -videos for sale -is beginning to take off in South Africa in a big way. The rampaging success of Disney titles such as The Lion King and The Little Mermaid, which appear to be addictive to children, spearheaded the influx into South Africa of an ever- […]
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 […]
Michael Finch Athletics South Africa’s dreams of hosting the World Cup soccer competition in 2002 could well be decided in Johannesburg from September 11-13 when the athletics version of the World Cup takes place at the Johannesburg stadium. The event will be more than just the third biggest track and field festival in the world […]
Small is not just beautiful, but dutiful. Tim Radford reports on the coming of the almost invisible machine The new machines are millimetres big at the most. Their moving parts are microscopic: the size of pollen grains. The first may have already saved your life on the road and the latest may already be saving […]
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 […]
Ferial Haffajee Strike action in South Africa is on the increase – but it is fuelled less by party political tension and more by the shrinking economy. “This is not Cosatu [the Congress of South African Trade Unions] sending warnings to the [African National Congress/South African Communist Party/Cosatu] alliance. But the strikes are political if […]
disarray Howard Barrell Politicians from all major parties and some international relations experts are worried by what they see as disarray in South African foreign policy exposed by the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They believe the impasse is undermining the country’s interests in the region and could mar President Nelson Mandela’s hosting […]
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, […]
superior? Carolize Jansen In research done by the Sports Information and Science Agency (Sisa) in South Africa, the following interesting statistics came to light: when asking women about obstacles they faced in sport: 10% of women between 18 and 24 years mentioned men’s physical strength advantage, compared to the average of 5% of older women. […]
gets the chop Anton Marshall An old, decayed building in Wynberg is all that stands as a reminder of an entire era in film culture on the Cape Flats. From as far back as the Seventies and up until the late Eighties, features at cinemas like the Luxurama and Studio 1 donned a fairly uniform […]
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, 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, 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, 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 […]
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, 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
SARAH BULLEN, Johannesburg | Tuesday 5.00pm. THE inflation rate — the annual rate of change in the Consumer Price Index — was 6,6% at July 1998, the latest figures from the Central Statistical Services released on Tuesday indicate. This rate is 1,4 percentage points higher than the annual rate of 5,2% calculated in June, largely […]
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 […]
SARAH BULLEN in Johannesburg | Wednesday 5.30pm. THE Johannesburg Stock Exchange lost 8% of its value this morning in a massive crash — but recovered somewhat in the late afternoon to close with losses of 6,21% — still one of the year’s largest falls. At midday all indices had taken some of their worst falls […]