As the winter’s first snows fall on South Africa’s mountains, lots of us remember something we often forget – ours is a land of amazing mountains. Here are 10 of them, many covered in snow (with a surprise 11th at the end). We also remember that the Mountain Club of South Africa has this year been hiking these […]

Talented Cape Town chef and photographer Bruce Marais is one of four competing chefs on the latest episode of the hugely popular US channel Food Network’s show “Chopped”. In the show the chefs are given a less than obvious combination of ingredients to quickly transform into an appetiser, an entree and a dessert, with one of the four being eliminated after […]

The almost 300 South African firefighters deployed in Canada to help with wildfires there have been demobilised and are arriving home tomorrow, according to the minister of environmental affairs, who asked South Africa not to condemn the firefighters for what happened in Canada. “Condemning them for disappointing us can only demoralise them despite their successful track-record,” minister […]

Former ANC secretary general Cheryl Carolus says that President Jacob Zuma is dividing the country and African National Congress for his own enrichment, and that his legal bills have already reached R1 billion. “If you add up all the things that the president has serially (done), since pre-Polokwane, the legal costs, hundreds of millions each case,” Carolus told […]

For anyone who has been on a South African Airways flight – sitting way back in economy like many of us maybe – here’s a glimpse of what it’s like to be in the cockpit during take-off. This flight was a recent one from Johannesburg to Perth, Australia, on the A340-300. “Our long history of filming […]

Most of the websites of the SA Broadcasting Corporation, if not all of them, went down for hours on Sunday, after being hit by hacktivists acting against SABC’s COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s steps to allegedly censor the news. Anonymous Africa, which took similar action against the EFF a day earlier, said in a tweet early on Sunday […]

A diamond found in South African in 2014, the Cullinan Dream, has become the most expensive Fancy Intense blue diamond sold at auction, according to Christie’s. The diamond sold in New York this week for $25,365,000. In the audience was Mark Cullinan, an international jewelry dealer and the great-grandson of Sir Thomas Cullinan, who discovered the Cullinan […]

The MyCiti bus service in Cape Town has launched a free WFfi service on a number of its buses, and will continue the rollout gradually. The programme will begin on Monday. MyCiti said in a statement on Thursday the pilot on-board wifi offering will provide each passenger on a number of buses in the city centre with 50MB of data […]

A veritable who’s who of South African politics were at The Gathering in Midrand on Friday, organised by Nando’s and the Daily Maverick. The focus was on the municipal elections, and speakers included everyone from three Joburg mayoral candidates to finance minister Pravin Gordhan to the EFF’s Julius Malema – who, going by the coverage he got, had […]

More than five months after KwaZulu-Natal realtor Penny Sparrow hit world headlines for posting a racist remark on Facebook about the black people on the beach over the festive season, she has been ordered to pay R150,000 to the Oliver and Adelaide Tambo Foundation. In her post Sparrow compared the beachgoers to monkeys, unleashing a […]

Working on Fire, the South African group whose team of 281 firefighters went to help fight wildfires in Canada, said on Friday it was “extremely disappointed” with the turn of events this week when its team refused to work for two days over a pay dispute, which then “escalated into an international incident”. “To have a […]

Refentse Morake, a Vereeniging youngster, didn’t find success overnight, but pretty close. Just over a year ago the high-school student was overheard singing by someone who recorded him on her cellphone, the clip quickly spread, and now, just over a year later, Refentse has a CD out and several professional tracks on YouTube. His latest video is a […]

The premier of the Canadian province of Alberta has stepped into the fray over how much 281 South African firefighters there are being paid to fight forest blazes, while the team’s South African managers are apparently on their way to demobilise the men and women who have refused to work for two days. The premier, Rachel […]

After almost 40 years, the days may be numbered for Cape Town’s highway to nowhere. Mayor Patricia de Lille reportedly told a press conference last week that plans are in motion to join the so-called Unfinished Bridge near the V&A Waterfront to the N1. De Lille said plans would be announced later in June. In the […]

As Johannesburg celebrates one of its big birthdays (that’s one of the questions), the city is showing off its stuff more and more. It was recently called one of the “coolest” cities in the world (that’s another question, by whom?) and travellers are spending more than just one night there. In honour of all that – and […]

One South African airline’s loss is another African airline’s very valuable gain, it seems. Mango, the low-cost sister airline to South African Airways, is losing its CEO Nico Bezuidenhout, who many credit with the airline’s success while SAA stumbles from crisis to crisis. He is moving to the six-year-old African low-cost carrier fastjet, where he will also be CEO. […]

A team from South Africa is heading to Canada to clear up the confusion over the wages of almost 300 SA firefighters who arrived in Canada a week ago but refused to go to work on Wednesday because of a dispute over wages. It was a very different scene in Alberta from the one in late May […]

A guide from the tour group Pelican Point Kayaking in the Walvis Bay area of Namibia came across a stranded baby dolphin during one of their tours, and although he thought it would not survive, he carried it back to the water, only to see it come to life suddenly and dart off into the waves. The […]

If you’ve ever wondered how much a member of parliament in South Africa makes a month, or which MPs work hardest for their money, a new breakdown of the figures sets it all out – in hundreds of thousands of rands, cents and hours. The lists, which were released Wednesday by Africa Check and are based […]

Following the decisions by ratings agencies Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s over the past weeks to not downgrade South Africa to junk status, the third important ratings agency Fitch today followed suit. The rand, which has rollercoastered over the last five months, reaching a low of almost R18 to the dollar in January, firmed even […]

The security cluster of the South African government met on Wednesday to discuss a warning by the United States that shopping malls in Johannesburg and Cape Town could be a target for Islamic militants during Ramadan. In a statement, the presidency said it had “noted the security alert that the United States government has issued to its […]

On Friday two cyclists wheeled into Cape Town after a 19,000-kilometre trip from London across Africa, while a South African filmmaker readied to finish his bike trip across the US to raise funds for his next feature film. The journey from the UK by Emily Conrad-Pickles and James Davis (pictured above), done under the name london2capetown, was in support […]

South Africa’s CSIR has unveiled the fastest computer in Africa, which has been named Lengau, the Setswana for cheetah, it was announced on Tuesday. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre for High Performance Computing showed off the petaflops (PFLOPs) machine in Cape Town. “This is a supercomputer with processing speed capable of a thousand-trillion […]

Two of South Africa’s best-known actors, Marius Weyers and Sandra Prinsloo, who were seen around the world in the movie “The Gods Must be Crazy”, have teamed up again for a new thriller that is being released in July. The two, who have become sort of acting royalty, have been acting together for a long time, at […]

On a recent trip to Johannesburg, curiosity took me to the new Starbucks outlet in Rosebank, South Africa’s first. I know Starbucks from the United States, and even though I’m not a big fan of their brewed coffee – it’s not as bad as people say it is, but just not for me – I do like their beans. What […]