Video: No ubuntu from South Africa’s black billionaires

From midnight on 26 March, South Africa will be in lockdown due to the coronavirus, with many small businesses suffering. Two white billionaires, Nicky Oppenheimer and Johann Rupert, have stepped up to the plate and donated R1 billion each to a fund to help them, but no black billionaires are showing “ubuntu” or the mythical

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Italy records another 800 deaths in a day

The Italian region of Lombardy has introduced stricter measures in a bid to tackle the spread of coronavirus. Under the new rules announced late on Saturday, sport and physical activity outside, even individually, is banned. Using vending machines is forbidden. The move comes as Italy reported nearly 800 coronavirus deaths on Saturday and saw its

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French flee from Paris to the countryside

PARIS – Parisians thronged the city’s rail stations and took to the highway early on Tuesday to escape the French capital before a lockdown imposed to slow the rate of coronavirus contagion kicked in at midday. The Paris exodus drew dismay from provincial France, where many fear that city-dwellers will bring the virus with them

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FW de Klerk Foundation kow-tows to its critics after ‘apartheid statement’

The FW de Klerk Foundation has completely retracted its previous statement that characterising “apartheid” as a “crime against humanity… was, and remains, an ‘agitprop’ project initiated by the Soviets and their ANC/SACP allies to stigmatise white South Africans” (see below). It seems that the statement had been sent out by the Foundation’s CEO, Dr Dayne

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What’s affirmative about affirmative action?

“Cadre employment must stop and an effective civil service must be built up by appointing  competent people. Officials and managers at all three levels of government should possess the correct financial and technical skills for the job.” So declared president Cyril Ramaphosa after a visit to Kimberley recently where the ANC celebrated its 108th birthday.

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Cuban human rights not so ‘sexy’, Marita van der Vyfer

South African author Marita van der Vyfer has stated in an interview that “Cuba is the only place on earth where communism is still colourful and sexy”. However, according to Human Rights Watch, Cuba is still behaving very much like a communist, totalitarian regime with repression, intolerance towards dissent and imprisonment for merely voicing an

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Littering in South Africa is the expression of wider selfish – and costly — culture

Roger Southall, University of the Witwatersrand It is common when municipal workers go on strike in South Africa to resort to upturning garbage cans and strewing litter around city centres. Their message is clear: we may be at the bottom of the social heap, and you may think we are human trash, but by God,

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Anthony Turton: How BEE de-industrialised South Africa

In the closing weeks of 2019, South Africa reached Stage 6 load-shedding. This is uncharted territory, so let’s unpack it a little. Some years ago I wrote about a startling fact that few were interested in at that time. That simple fact was that Eskom, our national energy utility company, was running on standby generators.

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South African Police ‘refuse to act against crime’ — Judge

Problems of deliberate police inaction in the face of criminal thuggery were often reported in the mining areas of Mpumalanga, according to the province’s Judge President, Frans Legodi. In a new decision dealing with two cases before him, Legodi said the problem raised by these cases was far from unusual. It had become a feature

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Simple On-Page SEO Tweaks Can Mean More Traffic For Your Law Firm Website

Having an online website can help increase your prospective customers greatly than what your physical land-based office can reach. The same is true for your law firm website. Your website does not end its work after it has been established. With the website ranking algorithm of Google changing as time passes and with the ever-changing

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Gill Marcus received millions in donations from Steinhoff

Gill Marcus, the former Reserve Bank governor and currently an assistant commissioner of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) Commission of Inquiry, has been a beneficiary of Markus Jooste’s Steinhoff Group’s largesse, according to Independent Online (IOL). An NGO of which Marcus was executive director, Kilt (Knysna Initiative for Learning and Teaching) received annual donations in

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Except for Afrikaners, South Africans prefer their children to be taught in English

Steven Gordon, Human Sciences Research Council and Jaqueline Harvey, Human Sciences Research Council English is only one of 11 official languages spoken in South Africa. It’s currently the preferred language of education and is used in many of the nation’s schools. But most children entering the education system are not native English speakers and many

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Sex in history, by Gordan Rattray Taylor

Gordan Rattray Taylor SEX IN HISTORY First published in 1954

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Famine: Zimbabwe’s chickens are coming home to roost

Zimbabwe, which has been ruled by the radical Afro-Marxist party ZANU PF for the last 39 years and long a darling of the global left, is finally hitting an economic brick wall with a possible famine in the offing, at least according to the United Nations World Food Programme. The economic mismanagement of the country

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