South Africa

Looks like it's chaos over there in the US of A:

The order empowers Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to create a plan that will facilitate the resettlement of Afrikaners through the United States Refugee Admissions Program (Usrap) to be submitted to Trump and the Homeland Security Advisor. No plan has been drawn up thus far.

The lack of a plan may or may not have something to do with the fact that on 20 January, the US president signed an executive order suspending Usrap, the exact vehicle that would allow for the settlement of the “Afrikaner refugees” and effectively instituting an indefinite ban of refugees.

When I browse https://lemm.ee/c/southafrica@lemmy.world a lot of posts are missing compared to looking at https://lemmy.world/c/southafrica

Why is that?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/22815071

He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

Credit: https://www.zapiro.com/241217dm

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/1962641

South African rescuers have so far pulled 78 bodies and rescued 166 people from the Stilfontein gold mine over three days of operations, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe told reporters at the scene on Wednesday.

Imagine this: a young girl is shipwrecked along South Africa's Wild Coast in the 1730s.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22055020

Wanna guess where?

Water storage levels throughout Gauteng Province have significantly declined due to excessive water withdrawals by municipalities, raising serious concerns. Rand Water has repeatedly warned municipalities in Gauteng about this potential crisis. We have communicated through letters, held meetings with many municipalities, and engaged in discussions at Gauteng's Intergovernmental Governance Forum and the Gauteng Water Imbizo. Unfortunately, the crisis we sought to prevent has now materialised. The water supply systems in Gauteng, including Rand Water reservoirs, are critically low, and the situation is anticipated to worsen with the ongoing heat wave.

Rand Water would like to alert communities, particularly in Gauteng, that water storage could soon be depleted f municipalities do not implement our recommendations. It is essential to act now to prevent the impending disaster. Rand Water emphasises that it is operating at full capacity and cannot pump additional water into the

system. Due to the limitations imposed by the organisation's extraction license from the Department of Water

and Sanitation, Rand Water cannot extract more water from existing sources. The only viable solution to

address this issue is through Water Conservation and Demand Management.

In light of this, Rand Water has advised municipalities to reduce the physical losses of 33% identified in the No Drop report, repair leaks, enforce by-laws, and address illegal connections. Additionally, Rand Water reminds consumers that the organisation is a bulk water supplier; therefore, any water shortages should be reported to the respective municipalities, as the organisation (Rand Water) is not responsible for water

distribution within municipalities. Consequently, inquiries regarding water interruptions should not be directed

to Rand Water. Rand Water is left with no option but take steps to protect its system from total collapse.

For media inquiries, please contact:

• Justice Mohale (Media Relations Manager) at 083 417 6999 jmohale @randwater.co.za

"The EFF has been dealt yet another blow with its deputy president and founding member, Floyd Shivambu, resigning from the party. He will be joining former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto Wesizwe party but did not reveal which position he will be occupying."

"In his journey across the heartlands of the Karoo, Wandile Sihlobo meets with some of the black farmers who are still waiting for title deeds on land currently owned by the state. And he laments the condition of failing municipal infrastructure that he encounters along the way."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18506062

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/22593543

While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables.

New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.

A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.

It's installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight.

By comparison, experts have said the Coalition's plan to build seven nuclear power plants would add fewer than 10GW of generation capacity to the grid sometime after 2035.

Energy experts are looking to China, the world's largest emitter, once seen as a climate villain, for lessons on how to go green, fast.

"We've seen America under President Biden throw a trillion dollars on the table [for clean energy]," CEF director Tim Buckley said.

"China's response to that has been to double down and go twice as fast."