Big investor selloff; huge currency decline against the US dollar; a reformist leader hemmed in by populist and corrupt rivals; the former president uses the head of state’s difficulties to launch their fightback; a resource-rich economy is trapped in negative sentiment and low growth and unemployment and poverty ticks upward. If this looks depressingly familiar [...]
A couple of weeks ago, from 10,000km away, I had an epiphany. Or several of them. On a family vacation, I was standing outside the enormous, postmodern Samsung factory near Da Nang, a coastal city and resort in central Vietnam. The first of these was a remembrance, aided by Max Hastings’ new book, Vietnam — An Epic [...]
If the scriptwriters of the blockbuster television series Homeland had invented such a yarn it might have been rejected by its producers as too fanciful, and certainly too gory, to be filmed. A well-known dissident Saudi journalist enters his country's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and is never seen again; soon enough the host country provides lurid details [...]
With SA’s currency crashing through the floor, the petrol price going through the roof and confidence going out of the window, few bright spots shine amid a winter of discontent. But one stay-at-home value proposition (at a monthly subscription of just $9) is Netflix. It provides a cornucopia of viewing richness, unadorned by adverts or [...]
For students of American politics, there are at least three reasons to remember the late U.S. Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. First, as the Republican presidential nominee back in 1964 he posted one of the most catastrophic losses in modern American politics. Incumbent president Lyndon Johnson demolished him by the extraordinary margin of 22.58% of [...]
US President Donald Trump has strong local competition for the award which columnist David Brooks recently bestowed on him. He declared that the erratic leader of the free world as ‘ the all-time record holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect.’ In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger – two academic psychologists at Cornell University – described [...]
'Present at the Creation' was the title of US Secretary of State Dean Acheson's autobiography. As the US's chief diplomat between 1949 and 1953, he inaugurated and witnessed key events that shaped our world after the end of the war against Hitler and the commencement of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet [...]
It’s the memes wot won it. This shorthand definition of an image, video or cartoon — usually humorous and shared rapidly by internet users — is one of many explanations for the extraordinary results posted in Thursday’s British general election. Bundled off the campaign just three days before the poll because of a series of [...]
Israel is one of the few countries available for the South African political establishment to burnish their human rights credentials. For reasons of solidarity and expediency or simple inattention, such gross rights violators as Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Syria –where political protestors are shot dead, imprisoned or gassed with poison respectively, escape both attention and censure. [...]
'The return of Molefe to Eskom and the ridiculous reasons offered for it makes even Trump’s explanation for firing James Comey seem plausible' Here are two — of several — quotes plucked from the weekend which seem to describe the depressing national condition into which the Jacob Zuma presidency has plunged South Africa with its [...]
