What’s in a word? Quite a lot, sometimes, and not a helluva lot other times. But who’s to say? Several years ago, one of my dearest of friends, AGRB, was accused of being a spy for the apartheid state. I knew that the accusation was baseless, so did most of our colleagues in the media. […]
News/Politics
Posted inNews/Politics
Mangaung: Zuma 1 – Malema 1
The road to Mangaung is getting increasingly interesting and nastier. The media is also playing its role in askew and misleading reporting on the recent Limpopo ANC provincial conference and party elections to make it even nastier. I was totally confused to see various news outlets reporting that Malema has been thrown a lifeline by […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Linden execution: High horses and hometown tangos
This week a 35-year-old South African drug trafficker, Janice Linden, was executed in China by lethal injection. That China should dare apply its own laws on its own territory has unleashed in South Africa a whirlwind of misplaced outrage and platitudinous sanctimony. The Inkatha Freedom Party termed the execution ‘unfortunate’ — which it undoubtedly was […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Thank God for Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, author, journalist, master debater and razor-sharp intellectual has died. His passing was accompanied by an almost audible sigh of collective relief from the many hapless individuals that encountered him in debate while he lived. You could search long and hard for a sharper tongue driven by a more insightful, enormous brain for all […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
How to occupy the world
The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for world revolution.” This is an ambitious claim. In most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centres around the world. On October […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mangaung and the man from Nkandla
If the gaffes coming from the highest office in the land are anything to go by, there are forces right in the Union Buildings, Luthuli House and even in Cabinet working against and embarrassing the man from Nkandla. It seems the “Alliance of the Walking Wounded”, which rallied around President Jacob Zuma in the run-up […]
Posted inNews/Politics
COP17: Nothing to celebrate
By Alex Lenferna As COP17 finished on Sunday morning 5am, 36 hours into overtime, many celebrated the development of what is being referred to as the Durban Package. The South African lead negotiator, Alf Wills, among others, sees the Durban Package as a comprehensive deal that has taken into account the necessary compromise and has […]
Posted inNews/Politics
But gay is a Western invention
By Matthew Beetar Wow, go Hillary Clinton! As a friend on Facebook said, “It’s about time that the world’s most powerful leaders started acting like leaders”. In her recent speech made before the UN, the US Secretary of State argues, in short, that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) rights are human rights, concluding that […]
Posted inNews/Politics
President Zuma’s report card
It seems as if the Democratic Alliance was a little bit hasty in grading President Jacob Zuma and the Cabinet with the former being given an “F” for failure while the latter, with a few notable exceptions, not doing much better. Of course simply furnishing us with an overall symbol without going into any detail […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zille’s complaint to press ombud a waste of time
Independent Newspapers will be running a special feature on the ANC centenary in January 2012 that will be carried in six of its newspapers. It sent out letters to prospective advertisers inviting them to advertise. Newspapers run these special features to maximise revenue, that’s where it ends. That the publicity from the feature benefits whoever […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
If COP17 has to do with survival, why aren’t more people interested?
By Karuna Rana For those in the climate-change arena, the yearly UN climate-change negotiations remain an important event. The Copenhagen Summit in 2009 was a massive let-down. Last year, Cancun was unexpectedly hopeful and, this year, the climate-change negotiations have arrived to Durban, South Africa. COP17 is perhaps more crucial than previous meetings as the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
From Jewish South African to South African Jew
By Martine Schaffer The question of my South African identity was first raised when I went to Israel after school to study for a year at Hebrew University. I had been educated at Carmel College in Durban and brought up in an environment where my character was very much formed around being Jewish. In Israel, […]