Free Republic

Notwithstanding former President Jimmy Carter's recent statement to the contrary, Undersecretary of State John Bolton's remarks about Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns with the rogue island only 90 miles from the United States. Bolton, on May 6, told an audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation that the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya, all countries that Cuban President Fidel Castro visited last year. Bolton also made remarks, which may be interpreted as a clear signal of hardening State Department policy toward Cuba, faulting...

Scientists in South Africa have been stunned to discover that termite mounds that are still inhabited in an arid region of the country are more than 30,000 years old, meaning they are the oldest known active termite hills. Some of the mounds near the Buffels River in Namaqualand were estimated by radiocarbon dating to be 34,000 years old, according to the researchers from Stellenbosch University. “We knew they were old, but not that old,” said Michele Francis, senior lecturer in the university’s department of soil science who led the study. Her paper was published in May. Francis said the mounds...

South Africa’s new government is a “Government of National Unity” (GNU) between the formerly dominant African National Congress (ANC), the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), and the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). The new government is the result of a coalition agreement that was announced Friday, shortly before a deadline to cast votes in Parliament for the country’s president. Current President Cyril Ramaphosa will be returning to office. The ANC fell from 57% in 2019 to just over 40% in the 2024 elections last month. The DA, with nearly 22% of the vote, was the second-largest party. The radical Economic Freedom...

The US Central Command reporting destruction of seven aerial drone and two drone boats launched from Yemen... In South Africa a decision by the African National Congress to seek a broad-based national unity government... Two explosions near a merchant vessel in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen... French trainers (instructors) will go to Ukraine to train a Ukrainian brigade of 4,500 soldiers... Macron also announcing transfer of five French Mirage 2000 warplanes to Ukraine... Russian authorities arresting a French citizen accusing him of spying... US politics an Emerson poll showing Trump at 46 percent to Biden's... The UN...

Election Day on May 29 was a tumultuous, wonderful day for South Africa. Thirty years of corruption and ruin under the sole rule of the African National Congress Party came to an end. The ANC, which won 63 percent of the vote in the first democratic election in 1994, and 70 percent in 2004, now only won 40 percent.When the ANC took power in April 1994, South Africa had the strongest economy and the best infrastructure in Africa. We had a plentiful supply of the world’s cheapest electricity and the world’s greatest mineral treasure. The horrible apartheid laws had been...

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The African National Congress party lost its parliamentary majority in a historic election result Saturday that puts South Africa on a new political path for the first time since the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule 30 years ago. With more than 99% of votes counted, the once-dominant ANC had received just over 40% in Wednesday’s election, well short of the majority it had held since the famed all-race vote of 1994 that ended apartheid and brought it to power under Nelson Mandela. The final results are still to be formally declared by the...

After many years in power, a corrupt and inept government is finally close to being removed. There is no great confidence in the opposition — but the people have had enough of seeing their country ruined and are finally having their say. No, I’m not talking about President Joe Biden’s administration but South Africa, where the ANC looks as if it might be close to losing power after almost three decades of one-party rule. Very high turnout for other parties is understood to have perhaps caused the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, to fall below 50 percent...

South Africans will go to the polls on Wednesday, May 29, in what may be the last chance to save their country from the ruin wrought by the so-called party of liberation, the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC led the struggle against apartheid, and swept into office, with Nelson Mandela, in the country’s first fully democratic election in 1994. Since then, but especially since Mandela left office in 1999, the ANC has been running South Africa into the ground. Crime is soaring. Corruption is rampant. The country’s infrastructure is collapsing. Electricity is often unavailable, thanks to “load-shedding,” which are...

Thank heavens it wasn't raining last Tuesday morning, as it can do in late autumn in South Africa. It would have meant a drenching for the most unusual ­politician fighting today's election — a 32-year-old farmer's son called Chris Pappas, who is white and gay. Peering through owlish glasses, he was giving a campaign speech to 70 locals in their decaying village hall, a half-day's drive inland from the coastal city of Durban in the sprawling province of KwaZulu-Natal. The building had gaping holes in the tin roof through which you could see the sky. In every window the glass...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of “CNN News Central,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) argued that there’s never a wrong time to recognize a Palestinian state but Hamas shouldn’t be involved in it and while the ICC shouldn’t arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we should have something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Co-host John Berman asked, “Do you think this shows that terrorism pays?” Khanna answered, “No, it doesn’t. We should recognize a Palestinian state. That has been the United States’ policy, a two-state solution, 143 countries at the United Nations voted for it. Nelson Mandela called for...

Explosions late tonight in the Ukrainian cities of... Two drones flying towards Israel from Iraq intercepted... The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Martin Gruenberg saying he will step down... Russia allowing export of gasoline for the next six weeks... Haiti's main international airport reopened today after being closed... The South African Constitutional Court disqualifying former President Jacob Zuma... US politics a Harvard-Harris poll offering Donald Trump and Joe Biden as the only presidential choices... Mass protest outside Israel's parliament in Jerusalem... In the Netherlands medical businessman and former Labor Party politician Ronald Plasterk taking himself out of consideration......

South Africa returned to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands, this week in an effort to stop Israel’s ongoing military operation in the city of Rafah against the last Hamas battalions in the Gaza Strip. The struggling African nation — which faces elections later this month — took Israel to the ICJ earlier this year, urging the court to declare that Israel was guilty of “genocide” in Gaza, even though Israel has taken pains to avoid civilian casualties, and allows hundreds of trucks laden with humanitarian aid to enter the territory every day. The ICJ ruled...

The Interval Signal of Radio South Africa 1977

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum claimed to be in the business of buying and selling real estate, but he really bought and sold human kidneys for transplant, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday. The 58-year-old Brooklyn man was accused of trafficking in human organs, after a sting by an undercover FBI agent who agreed to pay $160,000 for a kidney from a live Israeli donor for her sick New Jersey "uncle." Investigators said Rosenbaum bragged about doing "quite a lot" of transplants over the last 10 years. "I am what you call a matchmaker," the complaint said the man, also known...

“30 years on, South Africa still dismantling racism and apartheid’s legacy,” the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights claims.After 30 years of ANC rule by Mandela and his increasingly more corrupt klepto-commie successors, what is there to dismantle?Besides the ANC’s own racism.Apartheid has long since gone. A generation grew up without it and soon so will another. All they will know is ANC rule. And ANC rule has meant racism, violent crime and a regime so corrupt that it can’t keep the lights on, but can ally with Russia, China and Hamas.South Africa is a racist hellhole...

The terrifying moment a wheel feel of a Boeing 737 fully loaded with passengers was caught on video, adding to a long list of incidents. The footage showed the plane grinding along the runway after being forced to make an emergency landing shortly after takeoff. Airport safety staff at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa noticed the FlySafair aircraft had damaged its undercarriage on takeoff. The airline said the plane made a low pass over the airport so technical teams could view the landing gear. Upon inspection, engineers found one of four rear wheels had been clipped during...

Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted last August that a drop in the importance of the U.S. dollar was "irreversible"—but there appears to be no sign that the global economy is turning its back on the greenback. "The U.S. Dollar was used in 48% of international payment transactions last year, the highest level in more than a decade. But Brics...," it said next to the graph, which showed the euro making 23.2 percent of transactions and the Chinese yuan way behind at 3.47 percent. "BRICS countries would like their currencies to be used in world trade, but each has a major...

In the midst of all its other woes, the Islamic Republic of Iran has just suffered the worst economic collapse of its existence: the Iranian rial has lost 30% of its value overnight.

For a moment, there was so much hope. 0:04 Apartheid was over. 0:05 South Africa had, for decades, essentially operated as two different nations superimposed 0:10 on the same landscape. 0:12 There was the white nation—wealthy and westernized—boasting a similar, if not higher standard of living 0:18 to that of Europe due to its similarly strong and diversified economy. 0:22 Then there was the black nation—impoverished and excluded from that wealthier white nation 0:27 by a legally enshrined system of segregation. 0:30 It felt like Europeans had just built an insular outpost in Africa—that’s to say, it felt 0:36 like...

JOHANNESBURG — Lungile Khoza is at her wits' end. The mother of four has been without water at her home for three weeks, the kids are dehydrated and sick, and she can't run her small hair salon so she's losing money. Khoza, 37, lives in Soweto, a sprawling township of Johannesburg, which is among the areas worst hit by a water crisis in the city. She says there are sometimes government trucks distributing water, but it often runs out before you make it to the front of the line. Then she says, the water seems to cause stomach problems for...