Once again it’s the week of Cosatu getting it right in the socio-political but wrong in the political economy – and vica versa when it comes to the ANC. Case in point Cosatu demanded the local currency be devalued or the country will face a general strike called by the union. It’s a pity that [...]

The informal alliance between third world campaigners and free marketers is one of the hallmarks of the repeated calls for first world nations to drop both their tariffs and subsidies on agriculture.
The argument for both goes that global food prices would rise to reflect true market conditions and impoverished third world countries would benefit by [...]

‘George W. Bush’s approval rating drops to 45% in wake of Schiavo case intervention’. That was the happy declaration by Reuters as many analysts grappled for an explanation why. The consensus decision seemed to be that Bush and Congress failed to appreciate most Americans personal feelings and experiences from arising from caring for a dying [...]

I guess Trevor Manuel’s really not going to become president, now that Tony Leon has endorsed him. That’s a bit like Michael Moore endorsing John McCain for the 2008 Republican Primary – a backhanded compliment at best. I realise that intra-ANC power struggles are far more interesting than actual elections, but that really is no [...]

There’s an interesting post on Belmont Club dealing with the issue of reforming the UN. Some of their suggestions are rather fanciful – I certainly don’t foresee the General Assembly being replaced by a “moderated electronic forum” anytime soon, no matter how good the idea sounds on paper – but other ideas are actually quite [...]

It’s not fresh news, but it appears that human science has advanced enough to directly see giant Jupiter like planets
Here’s hoping in a decade or two the technology will have become refined enough to see small rocky worlds similar in size to Earth. Then it’s onto detecting hydrocarbon signatures in their atmospheres.

Laurence hasn’t been the only one been having, shall we say, fun with spring cleaning and finding old articles. An old Financial Mail article from around May 1999 on Datatec reveals just how uncritical many financial journalists had become by that time with the dot.com boom. Enough to convince many that the arguments that basic [...]

Aziz Pahad has defended “quiet diplomacy” towards Zimbabwe. I suppose we should be glad that he’s making an effort:

“Those who criticise us have never given us any alternatives of what use we could have done, but constructively be critical and raise our concerns wherever we felt it was necessary to raise diplomatically on many occasions [...]

Have you heard of the ‘Incredible Vanishing Newspaper’ trick at all? This Day was the first local one to have done it recently but it seems that the Sunday Independent is following suit except in a different fashion.
Take a look at how much ‘meat’ there is on the paper – both with respect to journalistic [...]

Two days ago, while doing a bit of spring-cleaning, I found an old copy of The Star, dated 1975. Reading through old newspapers is often a fascinating exercise, and this one was no exception. There was an article in the business section that expressed concerns about Arab countries modernising too quickly; Iran especially. The author [...]

Transparency International, an NGO that deals with corruption, has released their annual Global Corruption Report. They figure there’s still plenty of corruption going on in South Africa, and calculate the damage to the local economy thus:

Corruption is costing South Africa’s private sector up to 50 billion (US$8.2 billion, A?6.2 billion) rands a year… It also [...]