Trier, Germany | AFP | As Germany prepares to mark Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary, the revolutionary philosopher’s legacy remains divisive more than a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With scars from the Cold War still fresh, people from capitalist former West Germany and the once …
Read More »Handshakes that shook the world
Seoul, South Korea | AFP | When the leaders of North and South Korea reached across the Military Demarcation Line to shake hands on Friday, they symbolically — if fleetingly — united a peninsula that has been divided for decades. The handshake between the two leaders marked the latest milestone …
Read More »Is it really 2018?
The evidence suggests otherwise Kampala, Uganda | CHARLES C. ROZIER | According to scholars throughout history, we actually aren’t living in the year that is printed on our calendars. The more the origins and development of dating systems have been and are studied, the more it becomes apparent that time …
Read More »Austria marks 80 years since annexation by Hitler
Vienna, Austria | AFP | Austria on Monday marks the 80th anniversary of its annexation by Nazi Germany, with the country’s President Alexander Van der Bellen urging young people not to be “taken in” by neo-fascist and far-right ideologies. On March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered 200,000 soldiers, SS officers and …
Read More »South Africa: a giant of Africa
Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | South Africa is the continent’s most industrialised economy and among its most developed, but marked by gaping inequalities rooted in years of racist white-minority rule that ended in 1994. – Apartheid – Black South Africans, around 80 percent of the population, voted for the …
Read More »100 years ago today, jazz broke loose in Europe
Nantes, France | AFP | A hundred years ago in World War One, a group of American soldiers stormed Europe — not to the boom of guns, but the swinging rhythm of saxophones, drums and horns. They came to fight in the mud against the Germans in a war approaching …
Read More »Is America a shithole country?
How Trump and his African admirers judge the quality of something based entirely on money THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Just before the outbreak of the Nama-Herero rebellion in modern day Namibia in April 1904, Chief Hendrick Witboi of the Nama tribe penned a letter to the …
Read More »Pro-apartheid S.Africa ‘homeland’ leader dies
Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | A former leader of a black tribal homeland that was one of the so-called Bantustans that helped to underpin South Africa’s apartheid system has died, local media reported on Friday. Lucas Mangope, 94, was president of Bophuthatswana until democracy in 1994 after which the …
Read More »Israel finds 2,700-year-old ‘governor of Jerusalem’ seal
Jerusalem, Undefined | AFP | Israeli archaeologists unveiled on Monday a 2,700-year-old clay seal imprinted with images and Hebrew words that may have belonged to a biblical governor of Jerusalem. The round button-sized seal was found in a building in Jerusalem’s Old City near the Western Wall and dates back …
Read More »Anti-apartheid heroes slam Zuma as ANC elects new chief
Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | The African National Congress was lauded for its moral authority in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, but many veterans of that era are deeply disillusioned by the party’s actions today. As delegates prepare to elect a new leader to succeed Jacob Zuma, …
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