Staff Reporter

It was a foregone conclusion. Sepp Blatter was always going to be given another term in office as president of soccer’s governing body, Fifa. But the ramifications for football are grave. Blatter is not fit to run a bath, let alone one of the world’s biggest businesses. Since he took over Fifa in 1998, the […]

Zimbabwe has declared a six-month national emergency and suspended import restrictions on drugs to treat HIV/Aids.

It was one of those steamy, Graham Greene-ish days in a nameless West African country. The conference was winding down, and six of the delegates, including myself, had been invited to pay a courtesy call on the president.

My unbridled admiration for the <i>Sunday Independent</i> took a giant leap sideways last weekend. This was not only because I couldn’t find John Battersby’s byline anywhere in last Sunday’s edition.

Something is wrong. The disruption of schools by the Congress of South African Students (Cosas), and its defiance of authorities, should not be happening. Cosas is, after all, a junior partner of the ruling party, and it enjoys support from the ANC.

This week the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> carries an apology to Leigh Day & Company over a report in our last edition on the financial award to asbestos miners formerly employed by Cape plc. Our report contained errors – our policy is not to conceal mistakes.

Eastern Cape premier says proposals for tertiary education fail to tackle historical imbalances. Eastern Cape Premier Makhenkesi Stofile has called on Minister of Education Kader Asmal to <i>hamba kahle</i> — Zulu for "tread carefully".

The South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union has offered to provide nevirapine to pregnant members.

The wave of violent criminal activity that has engulfed South Africa in recent years has posed major problems for the courts. The Constitution promotes the foundational values of freedom, equality and dignity. Criminals do not respect such values.

Walter Sisulu can still bring the party together. If South Africa is in danger of having the ANC as its ruling party for the next 100 years, it is in no small part due to that movement’s uncanny ability to manipulate events — sometimes entirely by accident.

If you ever felt a flare of optimism about the political and moral flavour of the Mbeki presidency, now is the time to quench it. There is no longer much doubt about what is happening to South Africa under Thabo Mbeki. Hope is being supplanted by depression.

The "processing" of the Immigration Bill has been an unmitigated disaster, both for Parliament and for efforts to redress SA’s crippling skilled labour shortage. Eight years of policy-making has culminated in a frenzy of law-making with almost daily changes of a fundamental kind.

Defence contractor Richard Young is accusing auditing giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which did much of the investigation into the multibillion-rand arms deal on behalf of state investigators, of having exposed itself to a serious conflict of interest

"I would rather die than be raped!" I cannot even begin to count the number of times I have heard this bavardage from the sisters. And frankly, given the sheer ridiculousness of the statement, it has
got me sufficiently bugged to put pen to paper

If Tony Yengeni goes down for corruption, it will be because he panicked. The former ANC chief whip and his corruption co-accused desperately tried to create a false paper trail to hide the massive discount

Beezy Bailey recently complained that, as a white artist, he had effectively been excluded from submitting work to be considered for acquisition by the new International Convention Centre in Cape Town.

President Thabo Mbeki emerged from his talks with the Nordic leaders on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) this week almost rubbing his hands with glee…

As the Lagos-bound Boeing 727 drops through the thick cloud covering Nigeria’s swampy coastal lowlands, a nervous passenger crosses himself and says a brief prayer. The concerned business traveller is just hoping the flight touches down safely, but he might also find room in his prayers for Nigeria’s beleaguered private aviation sector. On May 4 […]

WTA medical staff were on Wednesday set to carry out more medical tests on the mystery injury that forced world number one Venus Williams to pull out of the 1,244-million-dollar Tennis Masters Series event at short notice. The American, seeded one here, told WTA officials just half an hour before her match with Russia’s Anna […]

An Egyptian being tried for spying for Israel claimed on Monday he had information on the bombings of two airliners, including one which killed more than 250 people over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, a court source said. Magdi Anwar Mohammed Tawfiq, a 52-year-old unemployed man, told the High State Security Court in […]

FREAK storms that have battered Madagascar relentlessly for four days left the main port city of Toamasina cut off on Sunday from the rest of the Indian Ocean island nation, which is in the throes of a political crisis. The rains, which followed a cyclone that killed two people on Thursday, began easing on Sunday […]

EGYPT?S high state security court slated three hearings this week for the retrial of human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim on charges of defaming Egypt’s reputation internationally.

EIGHT candidates will challenge Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah on Tuesday in the country’s first elections since the end of a brutal 10-year civil war.

VOTER turnout was low on Sunday in the Malian election for a successor to outgoing President Alpha Oumar Konare, the west African country’s first democratic transition since independence in 1960. The government had appealed to voters to cast their ballots in force in the run-off election but it appeared many Malians had failed to respond […]

PRESIDENT Jacques Chirac’s appointment this week of Jean-Pierre Raffarin as France’s interim prime minister is a calculated gamble aimed at showing disenchanted voters that the newly re-elected president has understood their woes.

IN WHAT may foreshadow a climb-down, the council of the University of Natal is to refer the appointment of Malegapuru Makgoba as the new vice-chancellor to the university senate.

Pressure is mounting to finalise position papers for the fourth and final preparatory committee meeting for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in Johannesburg in August

"Authors and writers come away intrigued by the depth, complexity and paradoxical nature of the man. Heads of state and ambassadors come away deeply impressed with his grasp of the modern economy and the dynamics of global integration and the clarity with which he pursues his long-term goals…"