Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy Z Fold 8 range carries a heavy price tag for South African consumers, driven by premium fold tech and rising AI memory costs.

An investigation reveals a devastating crisis at the University of South Africa (Unisa), where staff deaths and alarming burnout rates signal a breakdown in academic support and wellbeing.

The dangers of living in an informal settlement were again highlighted over the weekend after multiple shacks burned down at the settlement at the Centurion Taxi Rank. This was the fourth fire during the winter season, following the blaze last month at the Bremer Street informal settlement, commonly known as the Groen Containers, and the fire in May, at the Plastic View settlement where over 200 shacks were destroyed in two incidents days apart. Emergency response to Centurion fire Emergency medical services group CERT South Africa said their Centurion crew responded to a major fire incident in the CBD on Saturday evening, after reports of multiple dwellings on fire at an informal settlement near Centurion Mall. “Upon arrival, crews found several structures alight, with Fidelity Secure Fire and the City of Tshwane Emergency Services fire department already at scene, actively working to contain and extinguish the blaze. “Initial reports from residents indicated five people were unaccounted for. However, after several hours of firefighting operations, this could not be confirmed.” Old East Safety Forum also responded to the fire alongside other agencies and organisations, assisting with crowd control, supporting the city’s emergency services department at the scene, and helping affected families in the aftermath of the fires. It said that while no fatalities had been recorded, one patient was transported to a nearby hospital for minor injuries. The cause of the fire was still unknown. Calls for municipal action Mamelodi resident Deego Mabula said he was deeply concerned about the informal settlements in the area. “It is disheartening to see individuals and families living without basic necessities, such as clean water and proper sanitation facilities.” Mabula said the municipality must take full responsibility for this situation, as it was local government that allowed the illegal camps to develop in the city. “These individuals did not just appear from nowhere; many of them have homes but find themselves in these circumstances due to various factors,” Mabula said. “This not only affects the lives of those in the settlements but also impacts the overall cleanliness and health of the city. “We must enforce existing regulations against illegal camping and ensure that the area is properly managed. “As concerned citizens, we can no longer turn a blind eye to these challenges.” Mabula has urged the municipality to take immediate action to address this situation, relocate those affected, and implement sustainable solutions to prevent further illegal settlements. City of Tshwane Emergency Services Management had yet to comment.

Bill Johnson was a most disagreeable man. I mean disagreeable not, as his legions of detractors do, in the modern sense of being unlikeable, unpleasant or offensive. I mean it in the word’s original, 15th-century sense: not agreeing, not consenting, not acquiescing. For the remarkable political scientist and journalist who died this week in Cape Town, known everywhere professionally as RW, was the ultimate contrarian. I had some 40 years of experience of this, maintaining a firm friendship with him despite our rarely agreeing on politics, the subject so close to our hearts, as well as the very substance of our daily working lives. Our first encounter might well have been our last. In the late 1980s, newly arrived at Oxford from Durban on a mid-career journalism fellowship, I sought out Bill to supervise my thesis. He was the obvious choice. British-born but raised in Durban, he had fled the country after graduating from Natal University, only a step ahead of the security police. Initially at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he went on to forge a niche at Magdalen College as a politics don of formidable reputation. He had extensive contacts within the anti-apartheid movement and the Labour opposition – he drove the Oxford campaign that denied Margaret Thatcher the customary accolade of an honorary doctorate – as well as having a consuming passion for all matters South African. But it immediately became clear that an opinionated journalist and an imperious academic, both of whom were sublimely certain of their own rightness, would do a great deal of head-butting. Bill wisely declined the honour, and I found a supervisor elsewhere. Instead he became a close family friend. We played bridge together, and he was best man – indeed, the only man besides the priest and me – at my tiny wedding in the cavernous Magdalen chapel. And many an Oxford night was spent in late, wine-fuelled discussion, dissecting the cascade of events triggered by FW de Klerk’s unexpected accession to the presidency in September 1989, culminating little more than four months later in the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela. Yet, whether as journalists or academics, we all wanted to be there, on the ground in South Africa, as the next chapters unfolded. By early 1993, I had left the Financial Times in London, returned to Durban, and begun writing the Jaundiced Eye column for the Independent newspaper group. But already the winds of political conformity were blowing hard. Bill could – and often did – boast of the movers and shakers who had survived the weekly one-on-one grilling of his politics, philosophy and economics tutorials at Magdalen. Five had gone on to become Cabinet ministers or chancellors of the Exchequer, two had become editors of The Economist, and another became prime minister of Australia. Yet despite his academic credentials, and the fact that, at 52, he had readily surrendered tenure at one of the world’s elite universities, there was no place for a sharp-tongued, critically minded white man at any university in the new South Africa. Instead, he became the first director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, leading it for six years. It was the perfect base from which to advance what still seemed possible: a South Africa that transformed, as history required, without abandoning constitutional liberalism in the classical British tradition – individual rights, equality before the law, restraints on state power and accountable government – within the disciplines of a broadly market-based economy. He also was writing prolifically: a stream of opinion pieces for both local and foreign publications, and became the Sunday Times of London’s regional correspondent. As always, we differed on almost everything. No matter how critical I was about the ANC in my writing, at heart I was an indomitable Afro-optimist, confident that a constitutionally grounded South Africa drawing on the talents of all its people would be a world-beater. Bill, in the opposite corner, was an incorrigible ANC pessimist of Chicken Licken proportions. Rubbing shoulders with so many exiled ANC luminaries had convinced him that the party, on the whole, was a gang of Stalinist-inclined hardliners, many of them intellectually mediocre, entirely ill-prepared for the mechanics of governing, and that South Africa would descend into the thuggery, theft and decline that marked most of post-colonial Africa. Gallingly, Bill turned out to be right and I wrong. Bill, provocative by nature and accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of British public debate, did not hold back in his excoriating attacks on the ANC government. Even Helen Suzman, still involved in the foundation that bore her name, at times became annoyed at what she perceived to be needlessly goading broadsides. “I do wish he’d watch his words a little more carefully,” she once remarked to me, which was a little rich coming from a woman whose fame as a parliamentarian rested on the verbal flailing she inflicted on her political opponents. It was not only that Bill’s words rankled an increasingly defensive ANC, especially the thin-skinned Thabo Mbeki who knew him from the exile years, during which, at different times, they also dated the same woman. The party was also becoming anxious about the influence he might exert abroad, given his international reach and reputation. At a time when virtually all of the foreign media was ‘on message’ about a benign ANC building a contented Rainbow Nation under Mandela’s saintly oversight, Bill’s doom-laden forecasts cut sharply across the prevailing narrative. An increasingly compliant local media took their cue from the governing party, and he became the target of often vitriolic attacks, accused of being unpatriotic, racist and trapped in a colonial mindset. Nor did Bill do himself any favours. In 2010, with the world’s attention fixed on South Africa during the closing days of the football World Cup that it hosted, he ignited a firestorm with an exceedingly ill-judged blog for the prestigious London Review of Books, to which he was a regular contributor on a wonderfully esoteric range of topics. He began the post by describing baboons descending on his Cape Town neighbourhood in search of food and how one had been killed by a dog. In the next paragraph, he turned to xenophobic violence against African migrants, who were “also essentially searching for food”. In a culture increasingly hyper-sensitive to the racial implications of language, the juxtaposition was a heaven-sent gift to his critics. Although Bill survived the campaign to silence him permanently as a journalist, the brouhaha undoubtedly inflicted considerable damage on his reputation. For the next half-dozen years, he was effectively frozen out of the opinion pages of South African newspapers. His journalistic career was revived only when Alec Hogg, the founder and editor of BizNews, gave him a regular slot on the platform, where Bill rapidly re-established his prominence as political analyst and commentator. Bill was cantankerous and could be ungracious to the point of rudeness. He could also be surprisingly sensitive when he felt slighted. He cut ties with BizNews after Hogg interviewed an aggrieved John Steenhuisen at length, following a column in which Bill had savaged the then leader of the DA in the most personal terms. I tried to persuade Bill that this was simply a right of reply, standard journalistic practice. However, Bill felt that Hogg had gone much further and had failed to stand by his columnist. As always, once his mind was made up, he would not budge. Bill and his wife, the historian Irina Filatova, had built a holiday home across the road from ours in Trafalgar, a little village on KwaZulu-Natal’s lush south coast. There, the Oxford pattern of long and passionate discussions about South Africa resumed. Bill was magnificently self-centred, and it was often difficult for anyone to get a word in edgewise. I remember one stormy night with him in full declamatory stride, a lightning bolt seemed to explode in the middle of the room and the lights went out. In the pitch black of a rural African night, while the rest of us sat stunned, speechless, our hair on end, Bill continued in full flow, not missing an oratorical beat. In Irina, who during the Soviet era was a specialist on Africa and its liberation movements at Moscow State University, Bill had at last met his intellectual and rhetorical match. His debating style, in keeping with his physical bulk, was to steamroller any dissenting opinions into submission. In contrast, Irina played the part of the intellectual guerrilla against him – darting in, drawing blood and then nimbly skipping out of reach. But she was also unflagging in her devotion to Bill, supporting him stoically through a succession of life-threatening health challenges that began in 2009, when a deadly bacterial infection contracted while swimming in the Trafalgar lagoon necessitated the amputation of one leg. Through that ordeal and those that followed as his health declined, he continued to write prolifically, with books, articles and searing critique streaming from his hyperactive mind. Perhaps Bill’s most controversial books were the two bestsellers that asked How Long Will South Africa Survive? The first, published in 1977, concluded that although the apartheid regime was more resilient than many thought, international isolation and mounting economic pressure would eventually force fundamental change. In 2015, he returned to the question in How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis, this time warning that under the ANC, the survival of effective government was threatened by corruption, state collapse and economic decline. Both books were deeply unpalatable to many and provoked furious reactions – the first from his critics on the right, the second from those on the left. Yet their central shared conclusion – that governments which subordinate economic realities and institutional competence to ideology and political survival ultimately exhaust themselves and crumble – appears to be standing the test of time. In an intellectual sense, at least, RW Johnson will outlive his critics.

New Kaizer Chiefs boss Fernando Da Cruz wants to sign four players in attacking positions. Here’s the latest as the club shakes things up. Chiefs boss says the club wants four players Kaizer Chiefs coach Fernando Da Cruz wants new options in attack. New wingers, a new number 9 and a creative midfielder are on the wish list for the French boss. “A striker, new wingers and an offensive midfielder. We have good profiles (already), but we asked management to get different profiles, so that we can play different football and be less predictable.” Is Duba for sale? Wandile Duba is arguably the best finisher at the club, and he’s popular among fans. Now 22, he can play through the middle as a number 9 or as a wide player in a front three. A return of three goals and two assists in 18 league outings last term isn’t great, but he does have a knack for scoring spectacular goals, often in big games. Will that attract interest from elsewhere in South Africa or overseas? Profiling Chiefs’ new midfield man Kaizer Chiefs have secured the signature of Adolf Mtasingwa Bitegeko from Tanzanian giants, Azam FC, for an undisclosed fee. Here’s a little more from the official club website: “The 27-year-old defensive midfielder, who was captain at Azam, becomes the first player from Tanzania to join Amakhosi. His arrival adds to the impressive list of players from over 20 different African countries who have worn the famous Gold & Black jersey. Mtasingwa brings valuable experience, having spent six seasons in Scandinavia, playing in the Icelandic, Norwegian and Finnish leagues. He returned home in 2024 to help Azam FC finish third in the Tanzanian league last season. The Tanzanian international has filled the role of vice-captain for his national team. We warmly welcome Adolf to the family and wish him success on his journey with the Glamour Boys.”

Jayden Adams was fondly remembered by his Bafana Bafana teammates as he was laid to rest over the weekend. The 25-year-old’s funeral service took place in Stellenbosch Attending were friends, family and dignitaries like the Minister of Sport Gayton McKenzie, Bafana coach Hugo Broos, SAFA President Danny Jordaan and CAF and Sundowns President Patrice Motsepe. JAYDEN ADAMS REMEMBERED BY TEAM MATES On Instagram, several Bafana Bafana players have paid tribute to Jayden Adams following his shock death, reportedly due to suicide, earlier this month. The tragedy came just weeks after the national team returned from the FIFA World Cup, where they made it to the Round of 32. Oswin Appollis, who spent time with Jayden in the US, after the tournament, posted clips of them dancing and spending quality time together. “My brother”, he captioned the post. Lyle Foster – whose own mental health struggles had made headlines – shared on his IG account: “I love you, my brother. Rest with God”. Teboho Mokeoena also referred to Jayden Adams as his “brother”, as did Iqraam Rayners, who was one of the first friends to pay his respect. He shared: “It doesn’t feel real, and I don’t know if it ever will. You weren’t just a friend—you were my brother, my blood, someone I could count on through the good times and the bad. We shared so many memories, so many laughs, and moments that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.  “Your loyalty, your strength, and the way you looked out for the people you loved will never be forgotten. My heart is broken knowing I won’t hear your voice, see your smile, or make more memories with you. But I’m grateful for every moment we had together. Thank you for being the brother you were to me. You left a mark on my life that nothing and no one can ever replace” ‘NOT ENOUGH HELP FOR ATHLETES’ Meanwhile, former Bafana Bafana star Brent Carelse has called on the national team to provide more mental health support for players. “So many of them [athletes] struggle. Everybody just expects them to be at their best at all times, and sometimes that’s not the case Carelse highlighted the case of Lyle Foster, who admitted to suffering from severe depression in 2023. Foster’s club, Burnley FC, provided him with professional support amid his health struggle. Carelse added: “In that team environment, a lot of people don’t understand that we as footballers and sports people spend more time with our teammates than we do with our family. “Not enough is being done to detect it at an early age as well, and also to help these athletes when they go through trauma and other things such as alcohol or drug abuse, or financially… There is not enough help for the athletes.”

South Africa's mobile operators have won 700MHz of prime spectrum, with Wi-Fi confined to the lower 6GHz band.

The operators want the high court to set aside regulations that will force automatic rollover of unused data bundles.