Scientists find that fish caught by small scale commercial fishers in Kalk Bay are contaminated.

The ocean around Cape Town is so polluted that pharmaceutical and industrial chemical compounds are accumulating in the flesh of fish caught off the coast.

Scientists from the University of the Western Cape’s chemistry department have found that fish caught by small scale commercial fishers in Kalk Bay are contaminated with antibiotics, painkillers, antiretrovirals, disinfectants, and industrial chemicals.

Why Tshepo Mahloele’s Lebashe has bought Tiso Blackstar’s media jewels.

Until it became South Africa’s latest media mogul in June, most people outside the fuliginous world of infrastructure project funding weren’t too familiar with Lebashe Investment Group (Pty). So what has propelled this well-heeled “unknown” down the path of print?

The answer, Noseweek can exclusively reveal, is General Bantu Holomisa.

Metro under the microscope for paying huge amounts for land in transactions that generate massive profits for speculators.

The months before the 2016 local election were busy times for the City of Tshwane Metro Municipality. It acquired huge swathes of land that saw a few people smiling all the way to the bank. One lucky guy pocketed more than R94 million. 

The property deals were all done back-to-back, meaning there were original owners as well as an intermediate owner or middleman who had only acquired the land for a few minutes on paper before transferring it at a much higher price to a third party; the City of Tshwane. The metro used taxpayers’ money to finance the sequence of deals right from the start.

Wilhelm Verwoerd and his calling to ‘transform apartheid’.

His biggest calling these days is to work towards bringing about “deep reconciliation” and “transforming apartheid” in South Africa, but there was a time when Wilhelm Verwoerd’s ambition was to become an elite solider in the South African Defence Force and to then go on to become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Now 55, the grandson of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd, has taken it upon himself, following an epiphany as a student, to atone for his grandfather’s legacy and to dedicate his life to doing what he calls “white work” with a view to achieving “deep reconciliation” among South Africans.

A report submitted to the UK Parliament outlines the damaging effects on children of ‘persuasive design’ on the internet.

The Disrupted Childhood Report co-authored by the 5Rights Foundation, the British charity advocating for children’s rights online, and [reputation and privacy consultancy] Schillings, sets out how “persuasive design” practices employed on the internet deliberately keep children online to collect their data for commercial gain.

The report sets out how these strategies exploit human instincts, how they are deployed, why they are habit-forming and what emotional, physical and educational development impacts they are having on a generation of children.

During July in New Zealand a national campaign to rid the country of lethal semi-automatic firearms was launched in Christchurch, where a gunman murdered 51 people at two mosques in March.

By the end of reading this book I want you to make a choice. Will you accept the machine control of human beings, or resist? And if the answer is resist, on what basis will you defend the rights of humans against the logic of machines?

In the twenty-first century, the human race faces a new problem. Thanks to information technology, vast asymmetries of knowledge have opened up – creating vast asymmetries of power.

Science is the antidote to our common sense interpretations of the world. It has shown us how our “of course that’s true” impulses will lead us down the wrong path. Common sense tells us that the earth is flat, vaccines do more harm than good, and that black people are intellectually inferior to all other ‘races’.

What’s to be learned from bribing traffic cops.

Don’t panic, she said, gently putting her hand on my shoulder, “We’re human”. That’s the nicest thing a traffic cop has ever said to me while taking my bribe.