The change is in your pocket

South Africa’s citizens have won rare victory over the SABC, the country’s public broadcaster, to carry campaign ads highly critical of the country’s president. Is this the start of a new era in media freedom? J. BROOKS SPECTOR contemplates the question, bringing American experience in as comparison. (read more…)

Phase 1 of the work of the Khayelitsha Commission was concluded this week. The picture that has emerged so far of the state of policing in Khayelitsha is little short of frightening, with witness after witness testifying to a breakdown of the contract between the public and police. The Commission is exposing not just the weaknesses of the criminal justice machine, however, but the entire structural ecosystem that fails the citizens of South Africa’s townships. (read more…)

As of this weekend, gay marriage is legal in England and Wales, the fourteenth and fifteenth countries worldwide to allow this. The irony is that the greater the freedom of Western gays, the more that gays in Africa, Russia and elsewhere may pay the price, as their leaders seek to differentiate their countries from the dissolute West. And as we know in South Africa, the right of gays to marry doesn’t necessarily mean their rights are protected in practice elsewhere – as witnessed by a brutal recent murder. (read more…)

Stand a chance to win an overnight safari getawat for two people, including a chance to stay in out exclusive, 5-star Ambassador Suite, by answering one easy question.

At which luxury game reserve just 2.5 hours from Cape Town ill you find the Ambassador Suite?

Find the competition Entry box in the sidebar on the right (read more…)

Yesterday was World TB Day. More people die of tuberculosis in South Africa than from any other disease. The HIV epidemic is to a large degree responsible for that. Dealing effectively with the one epidemic typically improves the outcomes of the other. (read more…)

The port city of Merca lies in the south of Somalia and sits between the Lower Shabelle River and the Indian Ocean.

It’s home to approximately 230 000 inhabitants,  but for 29-year-old human rights activist, Abdillahi Ahmed Mohamed, Merca will always be the city he left behind when he fled from the militant Islamist group, Al-Shabaab, one summer night in 2006. (read more…)

Yulia’s I Am A Ukrainian video has been seen by millions on YouTube. “We are normal people, not extremists,” she tells The Big Issue

The creator of a viral YouTube video urging international support for Ukrainian protesters has told The Big Issue that president Yanukovych’s mansion was more opulent than that of former Libyan dictator Gaddafi’s. (read more…)

Donning a blue vendor bib in place of a pageant sash, Miss South Africa finalist Jade Hubner sold a record number of Big Issue magazines in an effort to give one lucky vendor the day off.

That lucky vendor was Thelma Jack — who typically sells eight to ten magazines a day, but instead spent Tuesday doing household chores and visiting her grandchildren.

Both women were in tears on Wednesday, as 21-year-old Hubner presented Thelma with R2 360 in sales. (read more…)

Three high-profile journalists for Al Jazeera – including veteran correspondent Peter Greste – were arrested along with a string of other journalists in Egypt in December 2013 in what many critics say was an attack on press freedom. The military government in power has accused the reporters of conspiring with terrorists and broadcasting false information due to their coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood – branded a terrorist organisation after being ousted from power in 2013. Despite growing international pressure to release the journalists, the trial is set to go ahead in March. (read more…)

Fifteen minutes — perhaps the amount of time spent commuting to the office this morning. Hardly enough time to watch the evening news. Yet that’s the time frame between the deaths of elephants in Africa – one is killed every 15 minutes. (read more…)