Staff Reporter

The prison service is breaking its own guidelines on the treatment of HIV-positive prisoners, reports Mark Gevisser WHEN the kitchen staff of Johannesburg Prison were told, in September last year, that blood would be taken from them as part of a routine annual medical checkup, “Gerrit” thought nothing of it. Two weeks later, he was […]

The government’s affirmative action policy is cruel, heartless and immoral, argues Martin Brassey. Why are its victims so silent? OFFICIAL job reservation, scrapped in 1987, was reintroduced to South Africa a fortnight ago. Yet not a word has been said in protest. Where once the policy provoked uproar, now it evokes mere silence. Silence from […]

Overall leader Isabelle Autissier is up with the leaders in the first week of the second leg of the BOC Challenge SAILING: Jonathan Spencer Jones TABLE Bay put on her best with clear skies, sparkling seas and a fresh 15 knot south-westerly and over 300 craft turned out to send the fleet on its way […]

Mduduzi ka Harvey THE Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) has split, amid accusations that the leadership has given undue priority to police issues, misused union money and failed to resolve internal problems. The newly formed breakaway group, the Correctional Officers Union of South Africa (Cousa) — launched last week by prison staffers and […]

Pat Sidley SPORTS sponsorship received a major boost this week when the Department of Health announced stringent new regulations for advertising and packaging tobacco products. With both packets and adverts re-quired to carry visible health warnings, sports sponsorship may look to the to-bacco companies as the only way to go. The new regulations take effect […]

RUGBY: Andy Capostagno IT has been well documented that Ireland is a place where the unusual happens on a regular basis. And so when the greatest rugby player of all time walked into the Springbok hotel, ignored the tourists and invited their baggage master to dinner it should really have come as no surprise. When […]

A modelling roadshow gives rural women a chance to become Cinderellas of a screen fantasy. Ann Eveleth reports GROWING up in the Transkei village of Lusikisiki, Pamela Mandisa-Singenile and her four brothers had to huddle around a small television set connected to a car battery to get a glimpse of the modern world. Now 22-year-old […]

ATHLETICS: Julian Drew THE annual Soweto Marathon takes place for the second time on Sunday and despite the teething problems with the organisation of the race, it is fast becoming South Africa’s premier city marathon. Last year the race did not obtain official sanction from the South African Road Running Association. The Transvaal Amateur Athletic […]

A top-secret Armscor document contains startling information about arms sales. Gaye Davis reports ARMSCOR sanctioned the sale of military materiel to repressive dictatorships like Haiti, to countries on the brink of civil war such as Somalia and Sudan, and sold weaponry to Warsaw Pact countries — though not the Soviet Union — well before the […]

WE have sympathised with new cabinet ministers who have had to grapple with sometimes recalcitrant departments as they try to take hold of the machinery they need to implement their policies. So we are quite taken aback at Minister of Defence Joe Modise’s frank admission that he seeks no such control over his charge, the […]

Will their children should get an equal start in life? Four parents express their views. Pat Sidley reports THE routine business of choosing a school for a six- year-old has become a taxing dilemma for South African parents. Between the expectation of “a better life for all” and the terror of “falling standards”, sending a […]

Pat Sidley THE fledgling cellular phone industry has become the latest field for thieves and fraudsters with about R10- million of theft and crime occuring in the five months of the industry’s life. The scams are so rife and the amounts involved so steep that police have seconded a full-time officer from the fraud squad […]

William Pretorius ALLOW children to make their own films and you won’t get Mary Poppins, as producer Brent Quinn discovered when he workshopped scripts with groups of children from Hillbrow, Lenasia, Eldorado Park and Soweto. The results form the project Developing Visions, part of the South African International Film Festival. The children were chosen from […]

Big business parastatal, the Industrial Development Corporation, is up for restructuring, says the government. The IDC thinks otherwise. Reg Rumney reports DESPITE providing almost R400-million to support black economic empowerment, the parastatal Industrial Development Corporation is still up for restructuring. The recently released White Paper on the reconstruction and development programme reiterates an earlier promise […]

A little-noted post-election building boom provides valuable lessons for the recovery of our injured economy, writes Terence Moll ‘IF you’re a small builder and aren’t working every day,” the salesman said, “then you must be either lazy or fast asleep.” He should know: he works for a firm which sells precision saws, drills and concrete-cutting […]

Farouk Chotia ZULU king Goodwill Zwelethini has spurned Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s efforts at reconciliation. Speaking to about 10 000 people in kwaMashu last Sunday, Buthelezi said he had twice sent IFP deputy secretary general Mandla Zakhele “MZ” Khumalo (the sacrificial lamb for the Inkathagate scandal) to the monarch, offering two head of […]

CHILDREN’S THEATRE: Di Mannie ‘MOM, must we close our eyes?” asked a little boy in the audience as the show began and the theatre became a time machine with loud noises and flashing lights. When it was all over, it was the same voice that sighed: “Mom, that was so nice.” Director Jill Gerard believes […]

CINEMA: Stanley Peskin CONCEIVED as a television film, the Emmy Award- winning And the Band Plays On is a painstaking but sometimes flawed docudrama based on the book by Randy Shilts. The transposing of 664 pages of rigorous investigative reporting into a 140-minute film clearly posed a tricky problem of adaptation – – screenplay writer […]

Trevor Steele Taylor EMINENT French documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, renowned not only for his extraordinary exposes of Nazi war crimes but also for his volatile lawsuits against producers, has withdrawn from the South African International Film Festival. Ophuls, who was due to arrive yesterday for the opening of the festival, cancelled his visit at the […]

SENIOR National Union of Metalworkers members are to meet on Saturday to investigate claims of “serious sexual harassment” by two of its delegates during the Cosatu national congress. Numsa general secretary Peter Dantjie said national office- bearers would meet to weigh the allegations. Cosatu’s press officer, Neil Coleman, would not comment on the alleged incident. […]

Wiseman Khuzwayo THE dissolution committee of the National Co-ordinating Committee for the Return of Exiles (NCCR) is pressing the attorney general to prosecute the eight people implicated in defrauding the organisation of possibly millions of rands. This follows the disclosure in the WM&G last week of a report by a two-member commission of inquiry into […]

# RENE MCLEAN: IN AFRICAN EYES (Triloka Records) Rene McLean is the very talented son of Jackie McLean, the American sax player of the bebop era who is still blowing up a storm. McLean, who plays flute and all the saxes, was taught by his father, and mixed with and was influenced by such luminaries […]

CRITICAL CONSUMER Pat Sidley CONSUMERS are being endangered by lights which should not be installed near water, but are being sold to them as bathroom fittings. The manufacturer believes it is not his problem. And some specialist retailers, who ought to know better, are selling the equipment as safe for bathroom use. The South African […]

Agents of the previous government’s National Intelligence Service have been displaying an unusual interest in the RDP, report Drew Forrest and Wiseman Khuzwayo THE National Intelligence Service (NIS) has taken it upon itself to police the reconstruction and development programme — provoking an angry response from President Nelson Mandela’s office and the office of RDP […]

The seemingly impregnable infrastructure of the SABC is under attack — and it’s crumbling. Mark Gevisser reports on changes at Auckland Park AN SABC journalist, bleary-eyed from one too many late- night meetings of her transformation committee, looks up from the stack of organograms scattered around her: “Yes,” she says wearily, “things are changing here. […]

An explosion of shanty towns in the Vaal may force the PWV government to rethink its rejection of site and service schemes. Drew Forrest looks at the growing blight along the Golden Highway DRIVING south, it starts with Freedom Park and St Martin’s Trust, rambling down a hillside opposite Eldorado. Across the toll road lies […]

EDUCATION: Shattered school windows and poor relationships … PWV MEC for education Mary Metcalfe faces a tough task. But she is not daunted. By Gaye Davis SATURDAY morning at Mapetla Secondary School, Soweto. Parents, teachers, pupils and members of community organisations sit in the stifling heat of the cramped classroom. No one bothers to open […]

Next week’s Constitutional Court selection won’t provide much scandal, writes Lesley Cowling. But will this compromise its transparency? TWENTY-FIVE candidates for the Constitutional Court will be interviewed in the Civic’s Tesson Theatre next week, but it is unlikely that the hearings will contain the stuff of drama. Albie Sachs, director of the Constitutional Studies Centre […]

ON the eve of the launch of Weekly Mail & Guardian’s new supplement on nature tourism, environmental editor Eddie Koch has won a special merit award for his coverage. Koch won the award at this week’s SAB Environmental Journalists of the Year Award for his “consistently high standard and commitment to stimulating public interest and […]

New South African coach Bob Woolmer is faced with a bowling problem CRICKET: Jon Swift IT IS of more than passing interest that Bob Woolmer, our new national coach, sees his first priority as working on the confidence of the players who make up the South African side. “I think one of the problems is […]

Mondli waka Makhanya FROM Wilmot James’ office in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch one can see the gates of the president’s Westbrooke residence. And if one gets there early enough, one can see a procession of ministers and officials exiting from President Nelson Mandela’s legendary early morning meetings. So it is quite apt that […]

NATIVE TONGUE Bafana Khumalo IT started on Friday afternoon when he came over to my desk and said I should go to the City in the Sun to cover the Miss South Africa beauty pageant. My first response was to get down on my knees and beg for mercy. “Oh exalted editor,” I said, hands […]