Free Republic

Renowned economist Dawie Roodt said Eskom’s generation and distribution divisions are slowly dying, similar to South African Airways (SAA) and the South African Post Office (SAPO). Roodt made these comments during a Firstpathway Partners webinar on how the United States has emerged as a secure sanctuary for many South Africans. “Only the transmission part will remain, and the rest of Eskom will just slowly die and come to an end,” he said. Roodt previously explained that Eskom is completely bankrupt. “It has been operationally and financially run into the ground. It does not work anymore,” he said. Eskom currently owes...

In the late hours of Saturday, 11th March 2023, news floated on Twitter that South African musician Costa Titch has passed away after slumping and dying on stage. According to reports, the 27 year old artist was performing at a show before suddenly slumping on stage and confirmed dead a few minutes later. As at the time of filling this report there was no certainty as to what led to the slump or the cause of his death. Tributes have been pouring in on Twitter since the news broke. Politician Julius Malema tweeted a heart break emoji while fans have...

The "Tech Executive-1" in John Durham's indictment of a Democratic cybersecurity lawyer testified in a lawsuit that he had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when asked to testify by the special counsel. Rodney Joffe, former senior vice president at Neustar, coordinated in 2016 with Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, including Hillary Clinton's campaign and Joffe, from the FBI in September 2016 when he pushed debunked claims of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank filed a "John Doe" lawsuit and deposed Joffe in...

The South African president tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday as cases of the Omicron variant have surged in the region, officials said. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is fully vaccinated, is receiving medical treatment for “mild COVID-19 symptoms” after he tested positive on Sunday, his office said in a statement. Officials said he began feeling unwell after attending a state memorial service in honor of former Deputy President FW de Klerk in Cape Town earlier in the day.

A South African official said Saturday that rising COVID-19 infections among children in the country are mild concerns about the rapidly spreading omicron variant in the country. South Africa has seen an increase in hospitalizations in young children and pregnant women, but it is too soon to tell if the increase is from the omicron variant that was first detected in the country, Reuters reported. Ntsakisi Maluleke, a public health specialist in the Gauteng province, told Reuters there were 113 children under the age of nine in the hospital with COVID-19 in the province, an uptick from past coronavirus waves.

Coronavirus hospitalizations are sharply increasing in a South African province that has been identified as an early hotspot of the omicron variant, raising concerns about the new strain as health officials work to learn more about its transmissibility and severity. The Gauteng province — which includes Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa — has seen hospitalizations spike by almost 400 percent since the beginning of November, according to NBC News. During the week ending Nov. 6, hospitalizations in the province rose from 120 to 580, according to data from South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), cited by...

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Institute director Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Friday on CNN’s “New Day” that it was “possible” that the new COVID-19 variant B.1.1.529 from South Africa is already in the United States. Fauci said, “Certainly there is a new variant that is now in South Africa in the Gauteng province that has some mutations that are raising some concern, particularly with regard to possibly transmissibility increase and possible evasion of immune response. We don’t know that for sure right now. This is something that’s in motion.”

A COVID-19 variant first detected in South Africa could be more infectious than other mutations – and may have the potential of being resistant to vaccines, according to a report. The C.1.2 strain has been linked to “increased transmissibility” and is said to have mutated the most from the original virus, which first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the Mirror reported. The strain has a mutation rate of about 41.8 mutations per year, almost double the global mutation rate seen in any other existing Variant of Concern, or VOC, according to experts at South Africa’s National Institute for...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa may evade the protection provided by Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is very low and the research has not been peer reviewed. The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease. It matched age and gender, among other characteristics. The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to...

The first two US cases of the South African variant of COVID-19 have been found in South Carolina, health officials said Thursday. “The arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 variant in our state is an important reminder to all South Carolinians that the fight against this deadly virus is far from over,” Dr. Brannon Traxler, the interim public health director of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, said in a release. The virus variant — known as the B1351 strain and thought to be more contagious than the UK variant — was discovered in a sample tested by the...

The new COVID-19 variant detected in South Africa poses an even greater risk than the highly infectious strain that turned up in UK patients, the British health secretary said on Monday. Secretary Matt Hancock called the South African variant a “very significant problem” in a Monday interview on BBC radio.

GENEVA (AP) — A Swiss man suspected of being involved in the world's biggest nuclear smuggling ring claims he supplied the CIA with information that led to the breakup of the black market nuclear network led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. In a documentary airing Thursday on Swiss TV station SF1, Urs Tinner says he tipped off U.S. intelligence about a delivery of centrifuge parts meant for Libya's nuclear weapons program. The shipment was seized at the Italian port of Taranto in 2003, forcing Libya to admit and eventually renounce its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The 43-year-old Tinner...

EXCLUSIVE: Meet Hunter Biden's new wife! Just weeks after splitting up with his brother Beau's widow, the vice president's son secretly marries world-traveling South African activist. Joe Biden's son Hunter, 49, married Melissa Cohen, from South Africa, in Los Angeles in mid-May. Hunter used an instant marriage company to marry Cohen, and the hasty vows hint that Joe and the rest of the Bidens were not in attendance for the big day. A friend of Cohen said she lived in Los Angeles and the newlyweds met in May, having a whirlwind romance and getting matching tattoos. On Sunday, Jill Biden...

A secret business deal between the government of Guinea and a multinational firm with a U.S. partner aided by the Obama administration’s wrongheaded foreign policy could cost American businesses billions. Congress ought to investigate to protect American investors, expose any political shenanigans and prosecute the guilty. The London Sunday Times first cracked the story June 3 of the secret $25 million loan between an offshore company, Palladino Capital 2, and the cash-strapped West African country. The funds, according to the loan agreement, were to finance the start-up of Guinea’s state mining company, Heritage, but the cash allegedly disappeared and the...

South African Zulu King Invokes Fight Against AIDS, Drought, in Plea to ANC Government to Retain Close Israel Ties Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithinii during the unveiling of a memorial to the Battle of Isandlwana, in which a Zulu force clashed with invading British soldiers in 1879. Photo: JN / JDP / Reuters. The king of South Africa’s Zulu nation has urged the country’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) to retain close ties with Israel, following last month’s vote by the ANC at its national conference to downgrade the South African Embassy in Tel Aviv to a “liaison office.” King Goodwill...

Nine-year-old Saneie Masilela has become the world's youngest groom for the second time after remarrying the 62-year-old woman he tied the knot with last year. Dressed in a silvery tuxedo, baby-faced Saneie clutched the hand of mother-of-five Helen Shabangu - her children are aged between 28- and 38-years-old - as they repeated their vows a year on in front of 100 guests.

We’ve known for some time that Nelson Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party. It was hard for fawning liberals to acknowledge the meaning of his membership, so they came up with a narrative explaining it. Their story went something like this: He only briefly joined to get the benefit of their organizational talent, and his membership was rather symbolic, and hardly meaningful. What is important is his steadfast commitment to non-violence, his adherence to political democracy, and the role he played after emerging from prison in the waning days of apartheid.

WASHINGTON: The famous African explorer Dr David Livingstone might have been impressed, even if the agenda was suspect. Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear proliferator-hero Abdul Qadeer Khan traversed the breadth of Africa in his hey day as a nuclear salesman , going to as romantic a getaway as Casablanca in Morocco and as remote an outpost as Timbuktu in Mali.   US officials might dearly like to get hold of Khan’s travel agent, or simply his itinerary, since he seems to have pretty much charted his own course during his profligate proliferating days. According to accounts now surfacing in the Pakistani media,...

If she takes up swimming again, she won't be able to wear her engagement ring in the pool - she'd surely sink. Prince Albert of Monaco has proposed to South African former swimmer Charlene Wittstock - giving her a ring that more than makes up for his reputation as an eternal playboy. The royal palace said in a statement that the engagement was announced today between the 52-year-old prince and 32-year-old Wittstock.

- Ahmed Khalifan Ghailani, a/k/a "Foopie," is a diminutive Tanzanian with an Uzbeki wife, six children and a deep hatred of America and Western culture in general. A devout Muslim who plays a mean game of soccer but never learned to drive a car, Ghailani is also believed to be a key al Qaeda player who U.S. agents think is involved in a percolating terror plot aimed at disrupting America's upcoming elections. He had a $25 million price on his head as the FBI's No. 7 most-wanted terrorist - the same amount as the bounty for the capture of Osama...