Staff Reporter

Hazel Friedman, of the <i>Special Assignment</i> current affairs show on SABC 3, walked away with a R100,000 cash prize as overall winner of the Vodacom Journalist of The Year 2007 competition in Midrand on Sunday evening.

This is a side of life the Burmese military junta might prefer you did not see: girls who appear to be 13 and 14 years old paraded in front of customers at a nightclub where a beauty contest thinly veils child prostitution. Tottering in stiletto heels and miniskirts, young teenage girls criss-crossed the dance-floor as part of a nightly "modelling" show at the Asia Entertainment City nightclub on a recent evening in Rangoon.

Singapore Airlines, the first operator of the new Airbus A380, has dashed the hopes of sexual thrill-seekers planning to engage in amorous activity aboard the world’s biggest jumbo jet. The carrier said it would ask passengers on the A380 to refrain from sex while ensconced in one of its 12 first-class suites.

There is a healthy pattern evolving in government, if you read last year’s ­inaugural DG report card in tandem with today’s. The state is decidedly less patient with under-performers — five failed DGs have recently lost their jobs. In the past year Itumeleng Mosala (arts and culture), Linda Mti (correctional services), Glen Thomas (land affairs), Jeff Makutula (home affairs) and Jabu Sindane (water affairs and forestry) have been sent packing.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) army on Wednesday exchanged artillery fire with renegade troops led by dissident sacked general Laurent Nkunda, the military and the United Nations observer mission said. "There was fighting this morning but the situation has calmed down," the commander in Nord-Kivu province, General Vainqueur Mayala, said.

Despite growth in car use, most South Africans still use public transport and walk to get around, even though public transport is in a parlous state. The National Household Travel Survey, conducted in 2003, found that 38-million citizens live in households with no access to cars and that 40-million citizens do not have a driver’s licence.

For those who take their lead from the old ideologies that sought to shape this country and failed so abysmally, the very idea of a Black Management Forum was and remains a cheeky notion — for blacks can only be drawers of water and hewers of wood. If black management generically were to fail, that Verwoerdian postulation would rise triumphantly from the graveyard of racial ideology, writes Bheki Khumalo.

Almost 80% of learners who registered for sector education and training authority learnerships did not finish their training courses, according to the department of labour’s latest implementation report on skills development. The report, released for the first time during last week’s national skills development conference, shows that only 16 507 out of 87 687 of the registered learners, mostly unemployed youth, completed their training from April 2005 to March 2007.

Information technology has lived through hardware wars, software wars, operating system wars, browser wars and is now preparing for a new one. The spoils in this battle are your documents. As an increasing number of users are turning to the web for Microsoft Office-type capabilities, but without the Microsoft Office price tag, a battle is being waged to provide these services — and more.

The Big Game was a victory for The Real Man and a crushing defeat for the illusion that we will ever admire anything as much as a good bit of bone-crunching. Sure, we’ll nod and smile in the general direction of the man wearing the Amanda Laird Cherry shirt and the baby carrier. Even rugby players appear in <i>GQ</i> and <i>Cosmo</i> Man spreads, wearing fine suits and not running into one another.

Santam, the country’s largest short-term insurer, says it will continue to insure Citi Golf vehicles and related models, despite the fact that these vehicles are considered high risk in terms of hijacking and theft. Some insurance companies have announced they will no longer insure certain models of Citi Golfs.