It’s been close on seven years since Michael, then not quite three months old, was admitted to hospital with a bruised and swollen left eye and a month later the four-month-old tot was readmitted to Johannesburg General Hospital. He was now permanently blind, with fresh bruises on his face and irreversible brain damage.

Finally the parents, Bradley Connor and Malinda Marshall, are facing charges of attempted murder.

On Saturday 3 July, Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota addressed a public meeting in Hermanus. At the time, Lekota was the president of Cope – but noseweek has no idea what his position might be by the time you read this. Not that many attended – a fair number of township dwellers and a sprinkling of whites – but then again there was the little matter of a World Cup quarter final.

Deon Malherbe, who was so outraged that the Overstrand council was selling coastal land adjoining Hermanus’s Zwelihle township to a property developer, to construct thereon a “secure, up-market" (read "white") housing estate, that he wrote an impassioned public letter opposing it.

Joburgers tend to be a hard-bitten bunch, but the story that broke earlier this year shocked many to the core: the City was getting rid of a number of its parks, and, to add insult to injury, they were being sold for peanuts to none other than sleazy businessman Zunaid Moti.

Now it emerges that millions changed hands in the illegal sales of prime city land.

The mystery of the missing Mandela Makarov is in the news again.

Amidst high security, plans are being laid to find the legendary pistol that Nelson Mandela buried 48 years ago on the Rivonia farm (Liliesleaf) that was the secret headquarters and birthplace of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Nicholas Wolpe, chief executive of the Liliesleaf Trust, is convinced that Mandela's directions were just a few yards off and that the gun lies on the other side of the wall.

Which side of the law you're on in the Northern Cape comes down to whether or not you're invited to the court president's Sunday braais.

A better picture is emerging of how MEC for Finance, Economic Affairs and Tourism John Block manages to evade the clutches of the law – he has friends in all the right places, including Khanilizwe Nqadala, president of the regional court of the Northern Cape.

‘Small town, barking dog’ stories don’t hit the headlines too often, do they? Yet sometimes it’s all there – the big news themes in miniature.  Like how having the right friends lets you evade the law; or how it’s practically impossible for the ordinary citizen to get the police to investigate their own. Then again; maybe this story is simply a caution against those “country dreams” that percolate through your traffic-clogged city day.

Top cops in the Western Cape's boerewors capital have turned a deaf ear in the battle over Bismarck, the incessantly barking terrier.

Bismarck's training regime includes being forced to drag a tyre up a hill and being thrown into the swimming pool. Not surprisingly, old Bismarck is a bit neurotic.

The interesting tale of the slimming pill that was and isn't and may be ...

They decided to take the sibutramine out of the product. So it wouldn't work anymore, but who needed to know?

It certainly grates that anyone can make a fortune selling “slimming” tablets to a gullible public. That the fellow can simply replace one scam with another, when things get hot, truly irritates. But that he can openly sell a schedule 5 drug is downright frightening, and a sad indictment of the current state of the regulatory system in South Africa.

Yet, there it is: ex-used-car salesman Dirk Uys managed to keep his Simply Slim lark going for some nine months.

Turning a PR triumph into a PR disaster takes some doing. But the Grand Daddy Hotel in Cape Town managed it recently, ably assisted by representatives from two professions that specialise in wrecking things - insurance and legal services.

The Cape Town hotel wrote off a guest's car and then promptly drove its own reputation into the wall.