A snapshot of each country on a continent you need to know more about ... Carbon emissions, gender inequality, history, human development, income inequality, internet access, languages, LGBT+ equality, trade partners, population density, size, urbanisation, women in parliament and much more.

South Africa has the 10th-largest disparity between legal protections (77%) and public opinion (58%) in Africa, giving us an Equaldex LGBT equality score of 67%.

From the UNDP Human Development Report 2025 hdr.undp.org/system/files...

The improvement is substantial. Viral suppression in kids on treatment aged one to four increased from 58% in June 2023 to 76% in June 2025, based on a cut-off of around 1 000 copies/ml. Using the much stricter cut-off of 50 copies/ml, viral suppression was 34% in June 2023 and 54% in June 2025.

"Nerd Reich". Hilarious if it weren't so floccing scary. Wilfully, gleefully, boastfully ignorant men. Jissis.

realistic Star Trek

The 400 years of slavery had a huge effect. Africans were being invaded both from the Islamic world and, of course, the Western world. Up to that point, communities had settled in comfortable places, such as plains and valleys. But then, suddenly, they all disappeared ...

The problem is, 320,158 tonnes is more than all the gold produced since we started mining the stuff about 6,000 years ago. The best estimates suggest that around 216,265 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history. That’s only two-thirds of what’s promised in Uganda.

If this isn't genocide, then what is? "Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare."

"This strange brew of shock, confusion, and ambivalence, I’ve realized, is the defining emotion of the generative-AI era. Three years into the hype, it seems that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it."

“The current size of the map of Africa is wrong,” said Moky Makura, the executive director of Africa No Filter. “It’s the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”

The graphic? So cool. The data? Not cool.

Finally! I worked there when I was 18. A magical, irreplaceable resource. "The central library was closed in May 2021 ... Residents were not able to access the library which holds over 1.5-million books as well as a vast collection of archived material not available anywhere else."

A headline that sums it all up.

The crux of their argument is that if they're found liable, then the consequences of their own actions that no one forced them to take could ruin them and the rest of their industry that undertakes similar practices. To which I say motherfucker did you never hear about Napster

Out of the R114 million in Google's new fund to help small, local and independent news publishers, Tshikululu Social Investments will get a R16 million management fee. That's 14%. A local publisher has described sum as “obscene”.

In its entirety, Jones’s claim is false. The clip is from a moment four years ago, when the country faced the unprecedented crisis of the arrest of a former president. And it could be said that the July 2021 riots were ultimately caused by the “White Oppression” of apartheid, not by its removal.

The destruction is beyond imagining, but there it is. "From the skies, it is striking just how small Gaza is – a sliver of land that has become the stage for one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts ... more than 60,000 people have been killed ... Thousands more ... remain buried under the rubble."

The 1996 census recorded a population of 40.6 million. Black people made up 76.7% of the total, coloured people 8.9%, Indian/Asian people 2.6% and white people 10.9%. In about 2013 the coloured population overtook the white population as South Africa’s second-largest group.

Moeketsi was no unschooled, mad, untameable “natural” genius sprung from squalor. He came from a home filled with music books. He studied and practiced devotedly to master his craft. His irresponsible youth had been no different from many of his peers’.

Do you really know your rights? Our no-nonsense guide will help you understand your rights, and the rights of everyone else. You can also read the full text of the Bill of Rights in 11 of South Africa’s official languages.

The idea of wellbeing often carries a Eurocentric emphasis on the individual – personal satisfaction, autonomy, achievement. Flourishing accounts for how whole a person is in relation to their environment, such as their values within their community.

Their important contributions have been relegated to the footnotes of the pages that document their findings. “These guys might not have degrees, but they actually know everything. In fact, a number of them have actually taught the professors and researchers who come to the site."

Fair point www.johnhawks.net/p/there-are-...

I am very happy to share this piece with you, exploring the link between inventiveness and play in nonhuman animals. It was written with care and a sincere desire to convey what science and philosophy can teach us about this fascinating topic. I hope you enjoy reading it! aeon.co/essays/how-e...

CG Finch-Davies, a British colonial soldier stationed in South Africa - and what was then South West Africa (today's Namibia) - before, during and after the first world war. He is most famous for his bird paintings. Unhappily, most of the birds he painted, he first shot. Some of his paintings:

It may be life, Jim. But not as we know it.

Did I say dumb as rocks? Yep, dumb as rocks.

The SA government should ignore the cries of pro-Western critics (which, in some quarters also includes the offensive suggestion that it appoint a white man as ambassador to the US) that discount South Africa’s real global potential. www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/...

ANOTHER journalist... ffs Israel

Eswatini, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and the Central African Republic.

Robert Sobukwe was one of South Africa’s greatest but forgotten heroes of the struggle for human rights and nonracialism. History overlooks the role he played in the protests that led to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, and the first global condemnation of the apartheid state.

Devastating....“Orchestrated assault”: New tsunami of NIH grant cuts hits South Africa hard | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Elon Musk's fascism is USA fascism. A style guide note: USAID prefers USAID instead of USAid because the latter may associate it with HIV and Aids. And USAid wasn't freebies, as Musk and Trump seem to think. It was USA soft power. Trump and Musk: dumb as rocks.

“This is the Night of the Long Knives,” says Glenda Gray, the head of South Africa’s Medical Research Council. Gray notes that South Africa, which has more people living with HIV than any country, has played a pivotal role in clinical trials for international guidelines on HIV and TB treatment.

Over the weekend, cancellation letters began arriving — abruptly terminating billions of rands in US-funded HIV and TB research at South African universities. Major programs like CAPRISA and Wits Clinical Trials Unit hit. 70% of SA’s HIV/TB grants come from the US NIH [email protected]

South Africa has 12 official languages and a multilingual population fluent in at least two. IsiZulu and isiXhosa are the largest languages, while English is spoken at home by under 9% of the population, two-thirds of them not white.

🇪🇺🇿🇦 – let’s write the future, together. In Cape Town, President @vonderLeyen took part in the EU-South Africa Summit. With an ambitious agenda, we’ve strengthened our strategic ties and joined forces to tackle defining challenges Ready to bring our relations forward ↓ europa.eu/!8MCvy3

Disinformation about vaccines in African countries inspired the founding of Africa Check, in 2012. And here we are: Europe in 2025.

South Africa’s story of HIV and Aids starts with tragic arrogance in a new democracy suddenly threatened from an unexpected direction. Then came activism and tenacity by ordinary citizens. Today, the country has one of the world’s biggest public health programmes.

NEW: Rubio confirms USAID is officially closed. It marks the US’s transformation from a global force for democracy to a vulture state. The pitch is now cleared for China & Russia. A foreign policy own goal for the ages and an unmitigated catastrophe for millions.

Finally watched this. Such a clear example of American ignorance and bullying. Let's hope the incompetence of the Trump administration ends American power in the world.

Talking about the paleoenvironments of early (possible) hominins in my Climate Change and Anthropology class this week! Pictured here is Sahelanthropus, from ~7 million years ago in Chad #FossilFriday

The world's erratic parent.

The Ebola outbreak in Uganda has worsened significantly, and the country’s ability to contain the spread has been severely weakened by the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign assistance, American officials said in private this week.

If you said anything positive about Nelson Mandela before 2008 (the year he was finally removed from the US terror list), under this policy, you'd have been thrown out of the country. But Trump has "brought back free speech."