News/Politics

If you want to know why you should not take seriously reports promising that the US “peace initiative” in Annapolis will end conflict in the Middle East, it may be useful to recall something of our own journalistic past. During the height of apartheid, some of our newspapers had a stock headline they would trot […]

Minutes before the Wits University book launch of Mark Gevisser’s over-hyped book on Mbeki, the traffic was forced to part on Jan Smuts outside the university as The Leader zipped past in RSA1 with a siren-blaring retinue of seven vehicles across three lanes. It lent an authentic African feel to the event. It is the […]

Ronald Suresh Roberts again tries to argue that President Thabo Mbeki is neither an Aids denialist nor an Aids dissident, but merely a poor, misunderstood and maligned man with a deep passion for the lives of the vulnerable and the poor living with HIV. This comes in the wake of Mark Gevisser’s comments that Mbeki […]

There’s something uncannily similar in the eyes of the faces that have allowed themselves to be seduced by child pornography. Look, for instance, at the faces of Pete Townshend and the recently convicted British actor Chris Langham. There’s an icy hollowness there that looks like a soul that has erased part of itself. Townshend, the […]

The Aids debate has entered a fascinating phase with Mark Gevisser’s nervous and hesitant — yet unmistakable — admission that President Thabo Mbeki is not now, nor has he ever been, an Aids denialist. Queried by the Sunday Times on Mbeki’s Aids stance, Gevisser replied: “He [Mbeki] doesn’t call it denialism, and I agree with […]

So, the Burma saga continues. After recent events — September’s bloody crackdown on peaceful rallies in the South-East Asian country, global protests and a worldwide vigil outside various Chinese diplomatic missions — the monks took to the streets again. In the days following the October 31 rally in Pakokku, a number of attempts to solve […]

Robert Fisk, in his latest article for the Independent (UK), claims that President George W Bush’s about-face, on the resolution to declare the 1915 atrocities committed by the Ottoman Turkish authorities on the 1,5-million Christian Armenians an act of genocide, tantamount to holocaust denial. Fisk even goes further in styling Bush as the David Irving […]