Tim Wood American Notes The air around corporate South Africa has been blue with indignation since Business Report’s Ann Crotty muckraked Nedcor’s annual report to turn up a dubious share option scheme. The ire is understandable, but suggestions that this sort of gratuitous executive self-enrichment wouldn’t happen in the United States or United Kingdom are […]
If the Brumbies lose, South Africa will host its first Super 12 final Andy Capostagno It is not often that South Africans shout for an Australian team, but it will happen on Saturday. A win for the Reds against the Brumbies in Canberra will guarantee for the first time that the final of the Super […]
Glenda Daniels Two top skills development executives with a sector education training authority (Seta) have been suspended on allegations of financial irregularities and personal enrichment. Dr Haroon Aziz, CEO of the Forestry Industries Education Training Authority (Fieta), and Daniel Malindi, head of finance at Fieta, were suspended three weeks ago. They are being investigated by […]
Yvette Gresl Needlework has become a significant form of economic empowerment for rural women in Southern Africa. Initiatives in Zimbabwe and South Africa have created opportunities for women to learn skills such as appliqu, embroidery and beadwork. Although needlework is increasingly recognised as an emerging art form, it is specifically targeted at the tourist market. […]
Byron Kennedy in London Industry leaders generally don’t like to rock the boat in public at least. That statement rings even more true when it’s a rather close-knit community like the one that gathered in London this week to take in the 17th annual Johnson Matthey platinum review. More than 250 delegates managed to squeeze […]
An investigation has been launched into shocking allegations against the Pretoria police dog school Paul Kirk Charges of sexual harassment, brutality and cruelty to animals are being investigated against a number of instructors at the Pretoria police dog school. The charges centre on the victimisation of policewomen and black members of the South African Police […]
Three East Rand communities claim that members of the local SANDF unit are taking the law into their own hands. Sechaba ka’Nkosi reports Members of a South African National Defence Force (SANDF) unit based in the East Rand at the height of political violence since the early 1990s have been implicated in a reign of […]
Barbara Ludman THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE by Denise Chong (Simon &Schuster) There are arguably half a dozen iconic images from the Vietnam war an American soldier flicking a Zippo to set fire to the thatched roof of a Vietnamese peasant’s hut, a South Vietnamese general shooting a Viet Cong fighter in the middle of […]
Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION With the advent of satellite television, those with the wherewithal to buy and have installed dishes, decoders and all the rest of it are offered what seems at first to be a plethora of wonderful entertainment and information. It’s a far cry from the early days of South African television when the […]
Julie Burchill Body Language I don’t “do”, in this order: Germans, blond men, sportsmen or men called Boris. (“Give it to me, Boris!” You couldn’t, could you?) But, should I ever run into the blond German tennis ace Boris Becker, I may well or would, if I weren’t a married woman grab him by his […]
Neal Collins Jamie Bloem, the 30-year-old who captained South Africa at last year’s Rugby League World Cup in England, faces allegations of racial abuse after an incident with a black player in a reserve match. The Halifax Blue Sox utililty player he is a capable kicker used in the back row and as an outside […]
Andy Capostagno South African Rugby Annual 2001 edited by Andy Colquhoun (Sarfu and MWP) The South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) is a paranoid beast. So much so that on page two of this annual it states: “The views represented in this annual are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Sarfu.” This […]
Richard Williams For the second time in five days the sun shone on Liverpool’s attempt to win a cup final, this time breaking through in the early evening after cloud and drizzle had shrouded Westphalia all afternoon. Coming 16 years after the Heysel tragedy cast a deep shadow over one of Europe’s leading clubs, this […]
China’s record on human rights is unlikely to affect its chances of getting the 2008 Summer Olympics John Gittings ‘Of course we want the Olympics bid to succeed,” exclaims a Beijing resident. “That way we will get a clean environment and a city worth living in.” The prospect of China hosting its first global sporting […]
The new 112 number will cut across provincial and municipal boundaries and be able to reroute calls to the relevant emergency services Jubie Matlou In less than a year a three-digit telephone number 112 is going to be the country’s common number for the public to access emergency services. The new number will integrate all […]
David Beresford another country The defeat of the recent initiative to have Cape Town’s cathedral corner Adderley and Wale streets named after former presidents Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk comes as a great relief. Attempts to memorialise the living always smack of self-interest. Such tributes are also tainted by an appearance of indecent haste, […]
Mail & Guardian Reporter Banks and other financial institutions have no excuse to refuse loans to people in the low-income category, if survey results released by the National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC) are anything to go by. The survey, conducted in five provinces, targeted people in the R1 000 to R6 000 monthly income group. […]
It’s almost certainly the beginning of the end for De Beers as a listed firm. But what of the Oppenheimer bid’s strange omissions to shareholders ahead of its victory? Stewart Bailey The bid by the Anglo/Oppenheimer-led DB Investments (DBI) consortium to take De Beers private seems a dead certainty after the South African Reserve Bank […]
whipping boy ‘Horseracing on its last legs” screamed headlines in The Citizen the day after newspapers announced the closure of Newmarket racecourse in Alberton. Yes, it was a slow news week, but the story is not entirely trumped up. Until recently, the cliques that controlled racing from their private dining rooms and bars, while charging […]
Nawaal Deane In a circus of events, Athletics South Africa (ASA) is embroiled in allegations of corruption, but documents handed to the Minister of Sport and Recreation, Ngconde Balfour, this week show only a paltry sum in comparison to original claims that R9-million is allegedly unaccounted for in the ASA account. The documents were handed […]
The Film and Publication Board has passed the video version of the French arthouse film <i>Romance X</i> for general distribution without cuts. The film, which features several scenes of explicit nudity and sex will carry an age restriction of 18, which means that it may only be rented or sold to adults.
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Windhoek | Thursday NAMIBIAS politically influential Council of Churches (CCN) wants to meet President Sam Nujoma after he called Christianity a “foreign philosophy”, the council’s general secretary said on Wednesday. The CCN’s request comes after a recent meeting between Nujoma and farmers where he also accused 19th century Finnish missionaries to the desert […]
TIMBER production in Congo is expected to reach 850_,000 tons this year as compared with 650_000 tonnes in 2000 because peace has returned after years of civil war, a top forestry official said on Wednesday. The forecast of a 200_000 ton rise in production is based on resumed logging in the central Niari and Lekoumou […]
THE Anglo American-Oppenheimer family deal to delist South African diamond giant De Beers is a “wonderful opportunity for South Africa,” South African Reserve Bank (SARB) Governor Tito Mboweni said on Thursday. Speaking on independent radio station 702, Mboweni said that the SARB would buy as much of the $3.5bn inflows as possible and would use […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Noupoort | Thursday A TEENAGER from Moreleta Park in Pretoria has died in a “detention camp” at a Christian care centre in Noupoort for drug and alcohol addicts, apparently after being chained by his neck in a disciplinary cell, Beeld newspaper reports. The centre, run by clergymen, has accused the police of “unprofessional […]
TUNISIAN soldiers are preparing to join the United Nations peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to the Tunisian defence ministry. President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali discussed the deployment, set for Saturday, with Defense Minister Dali Jazi in a meeting Tuesday, officials said. The soldiers, thought to number 200 though the […]
THE chief prosecutor of the United Nations tribunal dealing with Rwandan genocide suspects, Carla Del Ponte, on Wednesday rejected charges of racism from several court prosecutors whose contracts were not renewed. “These attacks of racism are absolutely ridiculous,” said Del Ponte’s spokeswoman Florence Hartmann. The only criteria for not renewing the contracts was efficiency, she […]
Race argument at genocide tribunal Seven black prosecutors at the UN tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, have raised issues of racism after not being reappointed by chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte. The BBC ‘Extinct’ plants found in N Cape Botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens’ millennium seed bank have found healthy specimens of two plants […]
AN Egyptian who had too much to drink in a nightclub on the banks of the Nile in Cairo, jumped into the river to dodge paying for his drinks, only to drown there, a police source said on Tuesday. Mohamed Massud, a 27-year-old taxi driver, had invited an electrician friend of the same age to […]
A SPAT is brewing between leading dial-up Internet Service Provider M-Web, and Absa Bank, which three months ago introduced its own free ISP service. On Monday, M-Web sent out a press release saying that Absa and its Internet partner Affinity, are misleading the public in suggesting that their free ISP service will survive. M-Web chief […]
LIBYAN leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi has told German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s chief foreign policy adviser, Michael Steiner, that Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco in which three people were killed, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on Tuesday. The newspaper reported that a law practice which represents survivors of the attack […]
NINE armed bandits were killed Monday and one was injured and captured during a camel-back clash with police in West Sudan’s remote Darfur State, a Khartoum newspaper reported on Tuesday. Reporting from Darfur, Al-Rai Al-Aam daily quoted Kabkabiya province commissioner Hassan Kuna Azraq as saying the police force retrieved 25 cattle looted by the gangsters […]