The Nobel Price for (SA) Peace

The latest furore about statements made by former apartheid president FW de Klerk has raised one very pertinent point: the political considerations that go into the decisions regarding the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. It also raises again the circumstances in which...

Neville Alexander, 1936-2012 | by John S. Saul

Is it important at a memorial service to use the sanctity of the occasion – sanctified by death, grieving and remembering – also to continue to speak truth to power? Debatable, perhaps, but not, I venture to quess, for Neville. For he lived to so speak: truth to...

Chávez’s Legacy | by Mark Weisbrot

Bertrand Russell once wrote about the American revolutionary Thomas Paine, “He had faults, like other men; but it was for his virtues that he was hated and successfully calumniated.” This was certainly true of Hugo Chávez Frias, who was probably more...

Knowledge. The final frontier

Some suggest that unemployment rates are high because of laziness or a dependency effect created by social grants, but numerous studies have failed to find empirical support for these claims. The one drum of this kind that continues to be beaten is the claim that...