Staff Reporter

South Africa’s 2003 wine grape harvest is estimated at 1,183-million tons, a 9,7% increase over last year’s harvest and 9 700 tons more than the exceptionally large harvest of 1999.

Swaziland’s largest, if illegal, opposition political party — the People’s United Democratic Movement — published its manifesto on Wednesday.

The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) has indicated that its leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi expressed misgivings that the ANC would keep its promise that pending defection legislation would be stripped of retrospective clauses..<br>
<li><a class="standardtextsmall" href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=9901">Behind the IFP, ANC compromise in KZN</a><br>
<li><a class="standardtextsmall" href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=9882">IFP opens door to 11th hour compromise</a><br>
<li><a class="standardtextsmall" href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=9904">ANC backtracks on floor-crossing bill</a><br>
<li><a class="standardtextsmall" href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=9881">IFP to set KZN on path to elections</a>

The government has denied that the Telkom share offer was discriminatory, saying all South Africans were eligible to register for the offer.

South African economic policy makers will be faced with a dilemma over interest rates in 2003 — whether to lower them as quickly as possible to support economic growth or to cut them more slowly to maintain capital inflows to support the rand.

Malawi’s finance minister is expected to come under investigation for his involvement in the controversial sale of the country’s strategic maize reserves just months before widespread crop failure.

Justice Malala, <i>Sunday Times'</i> New York correspondent, has been appointed the first editor of <i>ThisDay</i>, which is to be launched shortly as South Africa’s new international daily newspaper.

South African Airways (SAA) has unveiled a $200-million contract with Rolls-Royce plc for maintenance of the Trent 556 engines on the airline’s new fleet of nine Airbus A340-600s.

"Quiet diplomacy is the African way." Though this is a common refrain from the government, it’s not necessarily so as the African leader and statesman Julius Nyerere showed in the late Eighties.

The handover of the navy’s first corvette warship from the German Frigate Consortuim will be delayed by up to five months — at a cost of millions of rands — allegedly owing to the supply of faulty communications cable from a South African company.

Some seven years ago, as a penalty for a lifetime of heroic cigarette smoking, I was faced with a straightforward choice: undergo what in slang is called a “cabbage” – a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft – or standby for a major heart attack.

<b>OBITUARIES</b><br>
Jack Henry Abbott (58), murderer whose letters to Norman Mailer became the best-seller In the <i>Belly of the Beast</i>, by suicide in prison.<br>Glen Adams </b>(55), former Western Cape MEC.

A doctor always keeps records. In hospitals, even those in the developing world, they are required for clinical and legal reasons. But my first assignment as a volunteer surgeon found me working in a place where written records were almost an absurdity. In northern Iraq, during the Kurdish uprising at the end of the Gulf […]

The fact that the ANC’s National Congress was held in Stellenbosch, and in the DF Malan Memorial Centre, has been held up as a sign of the vigorous transformation that has swept through South Africa in the past 10 years.

<i>’In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.”</i> The now almost immortal line opening Hemingway’s short story, <i>In Another Country</i>, has a continuing and sometimes desperate resonance.

The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> team assesses the performance of the various opposition parties in the previous year.

Throughout history humankind has professed an aversion to war. Yet, strangely, our heroes and heroines have tended to be warmongers, warrior kings and queens, conquering emperors and gallant soldiers.

The performance of South African government members in 2001
BEWARE OF IMITATIONS

The best argument for including Gary Kirsten in the cricket World Cup squad was made, pretty much unanswerably, by the left-hander himself in Paarl in the fourth one-day international against Pakistan. For the second-best argument you need only to look at his brother Peter. Like Gary, the older Kirsten seemed to have been cast aside […]

Delegates attending the African National Congress’ 51st conference in Stellenbosch will meet behind closed doors on Thursday to adopt a range of constitutional amendments, resolutions and a programme of action for the next five years.

Fingers are crossed for the outcome of the talks in Pretoria on the future of the Congo. At time of going to press, there were rumours that a final document was ready for signature by the parties gathered at the presidential guest house.

Come Friday night South Africa will be boasting a new boxing world champion ? one who exudes power, determination and, most of all, attitude. Most of our recent world champions have been missing that prime ingredient. Attitude is by and large one of the key factors to making a boxer a saleable commodity and Lunga […]