Staff Reporter

Andy Duffy AROUND 8 500 Gauteng medical staff are to be redeployed or retrenched in a dramatic shake up of the province’s 35 hospitals. Three hospitals will close by February and seven – including Hillbrow -will be replaced with clinics or maternity centures. Staff at others – including Johnnesburg General and Baragwanath – will be […]

THIS might be seen as the week of the killers as victims. The amnesty committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been hearing five former members of the security branch confess to atrocities they carried out during the apartheid era. And SABC has been broadcasting a two-part documentary on the life story of Eugene […]

Simon Hattenstone talked to Joe Menell and angus Gibson, the men who made the extraordinary filem Mandela, now on circuit. DO you believe film-makers can change the world? Jo Menell: Definitely. If not change the world, at least wake people up, give them something to think about. Angus Gibson: I’m not sure films change the […]

Cape Marion Edmunds THE Cabinet has dispatched a crack team of civil servants and international experts to Bisho to investigate the administrative chaos in the Eastern Cape. The team, which includes a deputy director- general, chief directors and Swedish and British experts, is spending two weeks in the Eastern Cape and will report back with […]

Gaye Davis FREE STATE Premier Terror Lekota this week said he would deal with disciplinary charges to be brought against him by a hostile provincial African National Congress leadership “when they came” and defended comments he made on a radio broadcast as the political row in the province escalated to a new intensity. Lekota also […]

Alex Sudheim SIX years ago Nadine Raal was crooning for her supper in smoky jazz clubs on Durban’s Point Road, serenading inebriated audiences with Blue Moon and Old Man River. “But,” sing Pavement, masters of slanted and subverted country music, “you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent.” Presumably Raal doesn’t have too […]

Rehana Rossouw MEMBERS of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the Cape are reeling after white members of their church voted this week to retain its racially segregated structures. Following a two-year unity process, the church put to the vote last Sunday a resolution to abolish apartheid in its Cape structures – called conferences – […]

An alarmed publishing industry is up in arms over the threat of state involvement, reports Gaye Davis A SHOWDOWN is looming between the book publishing industry and the Department of National Education over proposals for greater state involvement in producing learning materials for schools. Bodies representing publishers, printers, paper manufacturers and booksellers met last week […]

Glynis O’Hara `EVERYONE thinks Australia has been conquered, but it hasn’t been conquered. It’s only 200 years ago that the white man came. They think they did it, but they didn’t. The roots of this country are just starting to speak.” The person talking is Mandawuy Yunupingu, leader of Yothu Yindi, the Aboriginal group that’s […]

A new research institute aims to make South African wines the toast of the world, writes Lesley Cowling PROFESSOR Sakkie Pretorius and his family had started packing, getting ready to move across the world. He’d been offered a dream job – head of a big research institute in New Zealand, where he would have the […]

Stefaans Brmmer DEPUTY Defence Minister Ronnie Kasrils this week joined in condemning the South African Defence Force’s (SADF) submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as “arrogant and disappointing” – but said there was very little the ministry can do to force military generals to reveal more. However, commission deputy chair Alex Boraine said if […]

THE little girl’s head was jerked back, seeming to stare longingly up the hill toward those who had fled without her. In the town below, young thugs pranced through the streets celebrating her brutal death. One of them had skewered the child through the throat as they hunted down people who had once been their […]

THIS is a story about that grey area between fiction and fact. It is about the tense sexuality in the most prominent of British boys’ schools that occasionally leads teachers to abuse the trust vested in them; and it is about the impressive ability of such schools to suppress for years any wider knowledge of […]

TENNIS:Jon Henderson ACCORDING TO a remark attributed to no less an authority than her mother, Anna Kournikova is the future of tennis, which will be a source of hope to all those who have given up on the women’s game because of its cast of calamity-prone, one-dimensional “characters”. Certainly there is growing evidence that there […]

Battle-scarred Zuma has some strong support in her Health Ministry’s latest war, reports Stefaans Brmmer HEALTH Minister Nkosazana Zuma may have a reputation for tilting at windmills, but for once her opponent – the fabulously powerful tobacco lobby – may have met its match. Zuma is backed by a strong body of international opinion and […]

SO when is it not wet and windy in Cape Town? I was about to abandon myself to the elements and head for the nearest Battery 9 gig when a pair of headlights split the night. I straighten out. My thumb, by now used to its role as travel agent, upright. The car slows down […]

LOCAL production company Penguin Films is going through the roof – what with its sit- com series Going Up beating Soul City to the top of the TV ratings with a combined adult and youth audience of 3,5-million, and a new character-based drama series Gaabo Motho, scripted by renowned author, anti-apartheid activist and medical doctor […]

David Beresford NELSON MANDELA’S pledge to uncover the “truth” of the 1986 Samora Machel air crash highlights the unsatisfactory outcome of the Margo Commission of Inquiry which blamed the tragedy on pilot error. The inquiry was flawed by the refusal of the Mozambican and Russian governments to exercise their right of representation as well as […]

FIGHTING spread in eastern Zaire this week with new raids on villages and refugee camps north of Goma, amid growing evidence of a co- ordinated strategy to drive Hutu extremists away from Rwanda’s border. Several dozen people were reported killed and tens of thousands more added to the wave of refugees. The latest attacks were […]

The Beatles are back and by far the biggest buyers are teenagers, writes Lisa Buckingham in London THE Beatles are heading for the biggest record earnings in their history thanks to huge sales of the albums Anthology 1 and 2. Nearly 30 years after their peak and having seen off fashions like punk, rap, soul, […]

REM frontman Michael Stipe’s dislike of clarity seems to grow with age. NEILSPENCER looks at his career FOR a man who has just carved himself a substantial slice of the biggest business deal in pop history, Michael Stipe sounds mightily disgruntled on his newly released album, New Adventures In Hi-Fi, and the bile flows from […]

Hazel Friedman AFTER five years of negotiating and 11 months after a deal was struck, actors are still stranded by the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) failure to sign a contract to protect their rights. And SABC officials don’t even know where the long-awaited Television Performers Contract is. Head of television Gill Chisholm told the […]

IT is time the African National Congress provided South Africa with a fresh dose of democracy. It is time to elect a president. Despite the country’s impressive start in the democratic tradition, the ideal has been flagging recently. The abrupt expulsion of Bantu Holomisa from Parliament has underscored the weakness of the party list as […]

Katy Bauer PIGEON racing: boring “hobby” or mystical love story? Belgium’s national sport may fuel the first argument, but it is the second that has real substance. Johan van Deventer, a building contractor from Elandsfontein, enters one of the avaries at the smallholding of friend and fellow pigeon fancier Norman Gruar. “Kom nou. Kom nou […]

Julian Drew THE National Sports Council (NSC) said this week it will investigate allegations of fraud against Athletics South Africa (ASA) which arose during the “rigged contract” scandal exposed by the Mail & Guardian three weeks ago. The allegations concern a fax sent on October 2 by ASA to Tommy Tesnar, the coach of Olympic […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy A GROUND-BREAKING unity meeting is to be held this weekend in Cape Town between the Black Editors’ Forum and the Conference of Editors. A culmination of many months of discussion between the two bodies, the meeting is aimed at establishing a single body for editors, senior journalists and other media players in both […]

Joshua Amupadhi and Mungo Soggot EVIDENCE that Gold Fields’s racial classification of workers could have contributed to the promotion of slaughter at the company’s mines has emerged at the Myburgh Commission of Inquiry. The evidence, which showed that the company identified workers’ ethnic backgrounds on their clock-in cards, followed a startlingly frank account of the […]

National museums fear the axe following a financial survey by government consultants, writes Marion Edmunds GOVERNMENT consultants have proposed closing down a number of national museums, including the War Museum of the Boer Republics, the Afrikaanse Taalmuseum in Paarl, and the William Fehr Collection in the Castle in Cape Town, to make way for two […]

Absa may have jeopardised its case against Bob Aldworth, following the disclosure that the bank’s counsel helped frame the charge sheet, report Mungo Soggot and Andy Duffy THE Amalgamated Bank of South Africa’s (Absa) legal battle with Bob Aldworth has taken a startling twist, with the disclosure that counsel acting for the bank helped frame […]

Max Gebhardt AN appeal was lodged on Thursday with the Publications Appeal Board in Pretoria against the controversial banning of the movie Kids. In his submission to the Appeal Board, Anant Singh, whose Videovision Entertainment owns the South African distribution rights to the film, stated that the banning by the censor board is unconstitutional and […]

Cinema: Derek Malcolm THERE have been plenty of films about the drug culture, almost all of them adopting a moral tone that liberals can conveniently call “responsible”. But there have been none quite like Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, adapted from Irvine Welsh’s novel. The film, like the book and the play, shows the pleasure of drug-taking […]