TUESDAY, 9.00AM The price of housing has fallen for the eighth successive quarter, says the latest Absa housing review. The price of housing has fallen by six percent in real terms since January 1, allowing for inflation. The weak housing market has also slowed down a rise in building costs, which grew by 4,3%, compared […]
MONDAY, 11.00AM: THE Gauteng Lions continued their losing run with a crushing 47-9 hammering at the hands of Waikato on Saturday, all the while keeping up the haemorrhage of players to injury as stand-in skipper Ian Macdonald and centre Japie Mulder fell by the wayside. The Lions are now left with a rather threadbare side […]
MONDAY, 11.00AM: LOG leaders Manning Rangers reinforced their position at the top of the League yesterday with a 4-0 walkover of bottom-of-the-table Witbank Aces on Aces’ home turf at KwaGuqa, ending all hopes that Aces might avoid relegation. Aces started the game fast and dominated play, but several chances were blown by their lack of […]
MONDAY, 11.00AM: ORLANDO Pirates showed their class yesterday when they fought from behind to win 2-1 against Zimbabwean champion side Caps United in the second round of the African Champions’ League at the National Sports Stadium in Harare. Underdogs United came out in fighting form and grabbed immediate control with a 10th minute goal by […]
MONDAY, 11.00AM: SOUTH African Morgan Ndumo, holder of the WBC B-grade “International”, went down in four rounds to Mexican challenger Paul Villahabos in a non-title bout at Wembley arena in Johannesburg yesterday. The agressive Mexican made up for his lack of height with a relentless attack, making his mark with a flurry of blows to […]
MONDAY, 9.00AM TREVOR MANUEL’S finance department has approached the major commercial banks for their views on the lifting of exchange controls and on capital requirements. The department wants commercial banks to buy and sell government bonds rather than the Reserve Bank, but has set conditions, such as a willingness by the banks to buy and […]
NEW CRIME INTELLIGENCE HEAD NATIONAL Police Commissioner George Fivaz has announced the appointment of assistant commissioner Tim Williams as chief of police crime intelligence, following the death of previous incumbent Leonard Radu earlier this year. LESOTHO COP IN COURT SECOND Lieutenant Phakiso Modise, one of two Lesotho policemen recently refused asylum in South Africa, appeared […]
MONDAY, 5.30PM: THE Moldenhauer commission of inquiry into irregularly issued drivers’ licences in Mpumalanga today heard that traffic officers accused of issuing as many as 300 fraudulent drivers’ licences a day at the Kabokweni testing station burnt down the centre in 1995 to destroy documentary evidence of their activities. Mpumalanga chief traffic inspector Francois Coombs […]
MONDAY, 3.30PM: SAFETY and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi today summoned the national and provincial police commissioners and safety and security MECs to an urgent meeting in Pretoria on Wednesday to discuss the deteriorating crime situation in the country. News of the meeting emerged at a meeting today of the gauteng legislature’s standing committee on safety […]
MONDAY, 3.30PM: WESTERN Cape police today expressed the fear that the ongoing war between Cape Flats gangsters and People Against Gangesterism and Drugs vigilantes could lead to a majow bloodbath. Since Pagad vigilantes murdered druglord Rashaad Staggie in a gruesome lynching last August, a campaign of tit-for-tat attacks has developed between vigilantes and alleged gangsters. […]
MONDAY, 9.00AM ECONOMISTS reacted positively to Reserve Bank figures released at the weekend which showed that foreign exchange reserves had risen to R14,4-billion at the end of April, up 9,9% from the end of March. More details, including the breakdown between gold and forex will only be made available this Thursday. But the bank said […]
A British TV documentary is about to lift the lid on the sordid ‘canned’ lion hunting industry in South Africa. Gareth Patterson, who was involved in the investigations, reports THE bullet slammed into the lioness and she spun in the air, falling against the electric fence behind which she was confined. Standing on the other […]
Anti-Aids activists claim the Health Department has good policies – on paper – but is falling down on implementation.Jim Day reports ONLY about half of R65-million budgeted for HIV education, prevention and care has yet been used -even while the virus continues to spread alarmingly. The money, from the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), is […]
AN imprisoned Chinese journalist, Gao Yu, has been awarded this year’s Unesco/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. The $25 000 prize is named after an assassinated Colombian journalist. Awarded for the first time this year it is timed for May 3, observed annually as World Press Freedom Day. Gao Yu (53) began as a reporter […]
Jacquie Golding-Duffy British Telecommunications (BT) took up the ultimate marketing challenge when it chose to be the title sponsor of the BT Global Challenge – a 10-month journey by 14 identical 20m steel yachts around four continents. Seen by many media observers and industry players as the most ambitious “relationship marketing” programme in the world, […]
police Police watchdog finds itself toothless as Western Cape officers defy its recommendations over Robben Island rape.Gustav Thiel reports THE Western Cape’s police commissioner, Leon Wessels, has defied calls by the government’s Independent Complaints Directorate that he reprimand two officers involved in the botched Robben Island rape investigation. Wessels this week also retracted the “unreserved […]
consultants DESPITE employing 125 000 public servants, the Northern Province wants to set aside R790-million this year to pay for consultants and “special services”. The province’s Premier, Ngoaka Ramathlodi, said this week that its army of public officials had been “mostly trained to clerical level” and that the consultants were vital to ensure its administration […]
SOCCER:Julian Drew HAVING travelled with Bafana Bafana to Pointe Noire to experience the inexplicable outbreak of “Congo Fever” which saw the locals’ confidant 2-0 predictions transformed eerily into reality, it was quite clear that there were “darker” forces at play. A simple stroll around the murkier corners of the local market and a once-over of […]
THE ROAD AHEAD by Bill Gates (Penguin Audiobooks, R79,95, abridged) Bill Gates’s manifesto on how computers will shape the future is arresting and thought-provoking. He recalls his first childhood encounter with a computer, and forsees computers and television merging. Gates believes the coming technological revolution will change the way we think, learn, shop and work. […]
FRIDAY, 3.30PM: AN episode of the British investigative TV programme The Cook Report, due to be shown on May 6, lifts the lid on SA hunting operations which charge large sums to set up kills for foreign hunters involving drugged or confined lions. The programme makes several allegations, including that: SA game farmers are breeding […]
Comet Hale-Bopp is a rare visitor to our solar system, writes Swapna Prabhakaran The comet Hale-Bopp has made a spectacular entry into southern skies, 4 300 years since its last visit. The first sighting in South Africa was at Sutherland Observatory, at sunset on April 21. Cape Town spotted it two days later, and now […]
University teachers face more challenges in the lecture halls now, but they are better for them, writes Eddie Webster I often meet students I have taught over the years who ask me nervously: “how are things at wits?” I am always cautiously upbeat. I realise, of course, that for some of us it was more […]
Gustav Thiel THE Anglican Church was due in Port Elizabeth’s Labour Court this Friday to fight a case in which God’s will (according to the church) squares up to the Labour Relations Act. Roger Paxton, a former Anglican rector in the Eastern Cape, claims he was unfairly dismissed and that the church breached the new […]
One of the biggest sexual-harassment suits in US corporate history has led to two senior officials losing their positions at Mitsubishi and 28 women are still set to sue. Frank Swoboda and Warren Brown report Mitsubishi Motor Corporation has replaced the top two Japanese officials of its United States auto-operations as part of the continuing […]
FRIDAY 11.00AM The start of trade in rand-dollar futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange next week will help stabilise the local currency, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel said yesterday. “Instruments like the futures contract are likely to dampen the volatility we lived through last year because they put instruments of choice on the market place,” Manuel […]
Anthony Egan THE GHOST OF EQUALITY: The Public Lives of DDT Jabavu 1885-1959 by Catherine Higgs (Ohio University Press/David Philip/Mayibuye Books, R79,95) Davidson Don Tengu Jabavu was a leading educationist and liberal political figure of early 20th-century South Africa. The son of a leading black journalist and newspaper editor, John Tengo Jabavu, he grew up […]
CINEMA: Charl Blignaut As I was leaving Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, it occurred to me that the impact of the movie pretty much depends on how screwed up your mother was. Or, for that matter, exactly how much it screwed your mother up to give birth to this life that would become a shadow […]
The first details of a shock report of Zimbabwe’s government troops’ atrocities in camp Bhalagwe and elsewhere has emerged despite Mugabe’s curtain of silence, writes David Beresford One of the untold horrors of Africa – the atrocities perpetrated by Robert Mugabe’s troops in the southern province of Matabeleland after independence -can finally be told. The […]
Gillian Farquhar A MAGAZINE for men that sells better than GQ and Esquire … not likely? But true … Men’s Health hit South African news-stands last week and is “the most popular men’s magazine of the decade”, says Jeffrey Morgan, its United States and worldwide publisher who was in Johannesburg last week for the magazine’s […]
Ferial Haffajee Trade unions are the training ground of a different type of MBA graduate. Like those with MBAs, unionists are all- rounders who are “well-versed in finance, work organisation and conflict resolution”, says Bobby Maree, programme co-ordinator of the Development Institute for Training, Support and Education for Labour (Ditsela). Years of negotiations have made […]
FRIDAY 11.00AM INVESTMENT in SA by United States companies is growing at 25% a year despite the country’s widely publicised crime problem, a US chamber of commerce official said yesterday. Bill Mallory, the chamber’s immediate past president, said: “A crime survey by the US business community, which is duye to be released soon, shows that […]
MOTORRACING:Alan Henry FERRARI’S Michael Schumacher was not sure what had happened to his younger brother, Ralf. All he knew was that the 21-year-old Jordan driver was running fourth in the opening stages of Sunday’s San Marino Grand Prix, on the tail of the eventual winner, Heinz-Harald Frentzen. “If Ralf had finished,” Schumacher said, “there might […]