South Africa

Protests and vigils have taken place around the world in support of Palestinians suffering in Gaza and to pay tribute to the four Al Jazeera journalists and two freelancers killed by Israel in the besieged enclave in a deliberate targeted assassination on Sunday.

Journalists, students, activists and members of civil society – notably in Cape Town, South Africa; Manila, the Philippines; and London, the United Kingdom – held the protests on Wednesday to call on their governments to put pressure on Israel to allow international media into Gaza and bring an end to Israel’s genocidal war there.

Late on Sunday, Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, along with cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, were killed in an Israeli strike that had targeted their media tent located by al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Al-Sharif had been one of Gaza’s most recognisable faces for his constant reporting of the reality on the ground since Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks on southern Israel.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,722 people and wounded 154,525. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel, and more than 200 were taken captive.

Nearly 270 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since the war began.

South Africa

Members of civil society and journalists gathered at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town on Wednesday to express their anger at al-Sharif’s murder, sporting placards with one reading “your voice was louder than their bombs”.

The location is significant, said Al Jazeera’s Fahmida Miller, reporting from Cape Town, as “it’s been an important signal against oppression here in South Africa, especially during the decades of apartheid”.

The people gathered here “have condemned what Israel has done”, Miller said.

“They want the entry of international journalists into Gaza in addition to the work being done by Palestinian journalists,” she said. “People here are angry.”

Journalist Zubeida Jaffer told Miller, “I was one of the journalists who were targeted, you know those media that documented apartheid, so this really resonates with me.”

Miller said, “The South African government has previously condemned the killing of journalists in Gaza, specifically in 2022 when Shireen Abu Akleh was killed. The South African government had said it was a violation of international law.”

Abu Akleh was a Palestinian-American journalist who worked as a reporter for 25 years for Al Jazeera, before she was killed by Israeli forces while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

In December 2023, South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

United Kingdom

Reporters belonging to the UK branches of the National Union of Journalists paid their respects on Wednesday to the slain Al Jazeera workers outside the prime minister’s residence at Number 10 Downing Street, said Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from London.

The reporters, holding placards bearing the names of journalists killed since Israel’s war on Gaza began, read out the names of each journalist that appeared on their placard and “symbolically, recited Islamic funeral prayers” for those killed on Sunday, said Hull.

Those present “have really condemned the British government … talking about its complicity in what is going on in Gaza, for not doing more and speaking out more,” said Hull.

While British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday “talked about his grave concern” about the killings of the Al Jazeera journalists, those present on Wednesday “want outright condemnation and nothing less”, said Hull.

“They also want the government to take firm steps to pressure the Israeli government to ensure the safety of journalists in Gaza, importantly to allow international journalists into Gaza to be able to work freely there and for an independent investigation to be carried out by … the International Criminal Court in order to provide justice and accountability for those involved.”

Last week, Starmer condemned Israel’s plans to take over Gaza City, saying they were “wrong” and “will only bring more bloodshed”. He has also announced that the UK will recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel meets certain conditions, including agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza and reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.

Philippines

Students, campus journalists and activists gathered at the University of the Philippines on Wednesday to express outrage at the killing of the Al Jazeera journalists.

They say “the attack … is a deliberate cover-up by Israel of its crimes against humanity” in the Gaza Strip, said Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Lo, reporting from Manila.

“They also describe the accusation that Anas al-Sharif, one of the most prominent voices reporting from within Gaza, is a member of Hamas is baseless,” said Lo, noting that protesters say “this is an age-old tactic used by governments who are bent on silencing the truth”.

“Any imperialist power … will choose a scapegoat to use as a pretext, however false it is,” campus journalist Karl Patrick Suyat told Lo.

These protesters also gathered to urge “the international community to ramp up pressure on Israel to stop its genocide, including for the Philippine government to cut its trade and defence ties with Israel”, said Lo.

The Philippines is the third-largest importer of Israeli weapons.

In June, the Philippines voted in favour of a United Nations General Assembly resolution demanding an immediate and lasting ceasefire in Gaza. This resolution also condemned Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war and called for Israel to lift its blockade on humanitarian aid in Gaza.

After months of dispute, Pretoria high court says Edgar Lungu’s family must hand over his body for burial in Zambia, against their wishes.

A South African court has ruled that Zambia’s former president, Edgar Lungu, who died in South Africa, should be buried in Zambia against his family’s wishes.

Lungu’s burial has been the subject of a two-month dispute between Zambia’s government, which had planned a state funeral for him in Lusaka, and his family, who wanted him buried in South Africa.

Lungu, Zambia’s head of state from 2015 to 2021, died in South Africa on June 5 while receiving medical treatment.

South Africa’s high court halted plans for Lungu to be buried in Johannesburg on June 25, hours before a private ceremony was due to start.

Zambia’s government had approached the court arguing that Lungu should be given a state funeral and buried at a designated site in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, like all other presidents since independence from the United Kingdom in 1964.

Lungu’s family said the late leader did not want the current president, Hakainde Hichilema – a longstanding political rival and his successor – at his funeral.

On Friday, a high court judge in Pretoria said Lungu’s body should “immediately” be handed over to a representative of Zambia’s court system for repatriation and burial in Lusaka.

“A former president’s personal wishes or the wishes of his family cannot outweigh the right of the state to honour that individual with a state funeral,” the court said.

Zambia’s Attorney General Mulilo Kabesha, who was at the court, said the government appreciated the judge’s ruling.

Lungu’s sister, Bertha Lungu, also at the court, was in tears after the judgement was read out.

Lungu’s Patriotic Front party said the family had “filed an appeal against the judgement”.

Lungu was elected to lead the copper-rich Southern African country in 2015, but lost elections six years later to Hichilema, from the United Party for National Development.

Since then, his wife and children have been charged with corruption and possession of suspected proceeds of crime, in what the family has claimed is part of a political vendetta.

Lungu’s daughter, Tasila Lungu, was arrested in February on money laundering charges, having previously been detained with her mother and sister on fraud charges in 2024.

Her brother, Dalitso, is also facing corruption charges.

South Africa’s leading paceman Kagiso Rabada says it is time to move on from the euphoria of beating Australia in the World Test Championship final, but insists the side have “nothing to fear” now following their belated major trophy success.

Rabada will lead South Africa’s attack as they take on Australia in three Twenty20 clashes and three one-day internationals starting in Darwin on Sunday.

“I think it was special, and I’ve done so many interviews on that since,” Rabada said of South Africa’s victory over Australia at Lord’s in June.

“I think it’s time to move on. I don’t think we’ll forget about that ever as a team, and South Africa won’t ever [forget], but time to move on now,” he told a news conference on Thursday.

The five-wicket win in the WTC final followed several frustrating near misses for South Africa in limited-overs World Cups.

“It was kind of like a relief. But the show moves on, and moving toward the T20 World Cup, I guess the approach will be a bit different.

“Now, you know, there’s no fear of anything.”

Rabada is relishing a reprisal of the rivalry between Australia and South Africa.

“It’s always some hard cricket being played, some good cricket,” he said. “Whenever we play Australia, I always feel like they get the best out of us, because they’re sort of in our faces. And I guess we like that.”

Rababa, who turned 30 in May, has not played since the WTC final in London.

“Thankfully, I’ve had quite a long break, so that’s been awesome. Maintenance work consistently has to be done because the volume of cricket is quite a bit.”

The Australia tour comes ahead of next year’s T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka, and the 2027 World Cup in Southern Africa, and South Africa hope the experience will benefit the young players in their squad.

“For me, that’s extremely exciting to see them raring to go. It’s just about trying to see where we’re at as a team, moving into almost like another generation,” Rabada added.

A majority of people in five nations – Brazil, Colombia, Greece, South Africa and Spain – believe that weapons companies should stop or reduce trade with Israel as its onslaught on Gaza continues, a poll released on Thursday reveals.

Spain showed the highest support for weapons deals to be halted, with 58 percent of respondents saying they should stop completely, followed by Greece at 57 percent and Colombia at 52 percent. In Brazil, 37 percent of respondents believed arms companies should completely stop sales to Israel, while 22 percent believed they should be reduced. In South Africa, those levels stood at 46 and 20 percent, respectively.

Commissioned by the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine network, endorsed by the left-wing Progressive International organisation, and fielded by the Pollfish platform last month, the survey comes in the wake of a call by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, on countries to slash financial relations with Israel as she decried an “economy of genocide“.

“The people have spoken, and they refuse to be complicit. Across continents, ordinary citizens demand an end to the fuel that powers settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide,” said Ana Sanchez, a campaigner for Global Energy Embargo for Palestine.

“No state that claims to uphold democracy can justify maintaining energy, military, or economic ties with Israel while it commits a genocide in Palestine. This is not just about trade; it’s about people’s power to cut the supply lines of oppression.”

The group said it chose the survey locations because of the countries’ direct involvement in the import and transport of energy to Israel.

More than 1,000 respondents in each nation were asked about governmental and private sector relations with Israel to measure public attitudes on responsibility.

Condemnation of Israel’s action in Gaza as the humanitarian crisis escalates was the highest in Greece and Spain and lowest in Brazil.

Sixty-one percent and 60 percent in Greece and Spain respectively opposed Israel’s current “military actions” in Gaza, while in Colombia, 50 percent opposed them. In Brazil and South Africa, 30 percent were against Israel’s war, while 33 percent and 20 percent, respectively, supported the campaign.

To date, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 people – most of them women and children. Now home to the highest number of child amputees per capita, much of the besieged Strip is in a state of ruin as the population starves. As the crisis worsens, arms dealers and companies that facilitate their deals are facing heightened scrutiny.

In June, as reported by Al Jazeera, Maersk divested from companies linked to Israeli settlements, which are considered illegal under international law, following a campaign accusing the Danish shipping giant of links to Israel’s military and occupation of Palestinian land.

On Tuesday, Norway announced that it would review its sovereign wealth fund’s investments in Israel, after it was revealed that it had a stake in an Israeli firm that supplies fighter jet parts to the Israeli military. In recent months, several wealth and pension funds have distanced themselves from companies linked to Israel’s war on Gaza or its illegal occupation of the West Bank.

Responding to the poll, 41 percent in Spain said they would “strongly” support a state-level decision to reduce trade in weapons, fuel and other goods in an attempt to pressure Israel into stopping the war. This figure stood at 33 percent in Colombia and South Africa, and 28 and 24 percent in Greece and Brazil, respectively.

“The message from the peoples of the world is loud and clear: They want action to end the assault on Gaza – not just words,” said David Adler, co-general coordinator of Progressive International. “Across continents, majorities are calling for their governments to halt arms sales and restrain Israel’s occupation.”

JOHANNESBURG — U.S. reciprocal tariffs have put an estimated 30,000 jobs at risk, South African authorities said Monday, four days before a 30% U.S. tariff on most imports from South Africa kicks in.

South Africa was slapped with one of the highest tariff rates by its third-largest trading partner — after China and the EU — creating uncertainty for the future of some export industries and catapulting a scramble for new markets outside the U.S. Tariffs come into effect on Aug. 8.

In an update on mitigation measures, a senior government official warned that an estimated 30,000 jobs were in jeopardy if the response to the higher tariffs was “mismanaged”.

“We base this on the ongoing consultations that we have with all the sectors of the economy from automotive, agriculture and all the other sectors that are going to be impacted,” said Simphiwe Hamilton, director-general of the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition.

South Africa is already grappling with stubbornly high unemployment rates. The official rate was 32.9% in the first quarter of 2025 according to StatsSA, the national statistical agency, while the youth unemployment rate increased from 44.6% in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 46,1% in the first quarter of 2025.

In his weekly public letter on Monday, President Cyril Ramaphosa said that South Africa must adapt swiftly to the tariffs since they could have a big impact on the economy, the industries that rely heavily on exports to the U.S. and the workers they employ.

“As government, we have been engaging the United States to enhance mutually beneficial trade and investment relations. All channels of communication remain open to engage with the US,” he said.

“Our foremost priority is protecting our export industries. We will continue to engage the US in an attempt to preserve market access for our products.”

President Trump has been highly critical of the country’s Black-led government over a new land law he claims discriminates against white people.

Negotiations with the U.S. have been complicated and unprecedented, according to South Africa’s ministers, who denied rumors that the lack of an ambassador in the U.S affected the result of the talks. The Trump administration expelled Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, in mid-March, accusing him of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates Trump.

International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola highlighted that even countries with ambassadors in the U.S. and allies of Washington had been hard hit with tariffs. However, Lamola confirmed that the process of appointing a replacement for Rasool was “at an advanced stage”.

The U.S. accounts for 7.5% of South Africa’s global exports. However, several sectors, accounting for 35% of exports to the U.S., remain exempt from the tariffs. These include copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber products, certain critical minerals, stainless steel scrap and energy products remain exempted from the tariffs.

The government has been scrambling to diversify South Africa’s export markets, particularly by deepening intra-African trade. Countries across Asia and the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have been touted as opportunities for high-growth markets. The government said it had made significant progress in opening vast new markets like China and Thailand, securing vital protocols for products like citrus.

The government has set up an Export Support Desk to aid manufacturers and exporters in South Africa search for alternate markets.

While welcoming the establishment of the Export Support Desk, an independent association representing some of South Africa’s biggest and most well-known businesses called for a trade crisis committee to be established that brings together business leaders and government officials, including from the finance ministry.

Business Leadership South Africa said such a committee would ensure fast, coordinated action to open new markets, provide financial support, and maintain employment.

“U.S. tariffs pose a severe threat to South Africa’s manufacturing and farming sectors, particularly in the Eastern Cape. While businesses can eventually adapt, urgent temporary support is essential,” said BLSA in a statement.

Gumede writes for the Associated Press.

President Donald Trump’s administration has unveiled a range of new tariffs to take effect in one week on most US trading partners.

Nearly 70 countries face Trump’s import duties that were due to come into force on August 1; most were delayed at the last minute and will begin on August 7.

Trump sees the tariffs as an economic tool of power that will put US exporters in a stronger position, by keeping out imports and encouraging domestic manufacturing.

While the situation remains dynamic, different levies will be imposed on countries, ranging from 15 percent on Japan and the European Union to 39 percent on Switzerland.

Here’s how countries and markets have reacted to the news:

China

China has warned that US protectionism “harms the interests of all parties”.

“The Chinese side’s opposition to tariffs has been consistent and clear,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said.

“There is no winner in a tariff war or trade war,” he added.

With no permanent deal in place, Beijing and Washington are negotiating a deal over tariffs. A 30 percent combined tariff will, however, be applied, following an agreed pause until August 12. That followed an earlier escalation to a 145 percent tariff on imports.

Taiwan

Taiwanese President William Lai Ching-te has called its 20 percent tariff announced by Trump “temporary … with the possibility of further reductions should an agreement be reached”.

The US president had threatened to hit the island with a 32 percent tax and possible duties on its huge semiconductor shipments.

Japan

A tariff of 15 percent agreed last week between Japan and Washington – down from a threatened 25 percent – is due to be applied from August 7.

“We continue to urge the US to take prompt measures to implement the agreement, including lowering tariffs on automobile and auto parts,” Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said on Friday.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ), however, warned that profits of Japanese firms are likely to fall this year because of US tariffs, leading them to downgrade capital expenditure plans.

Automakers have swallowed the rising costs from the tariffs instead of passing them on to US consumers, as seen in a fall of roughly 20 percent in export prices since April, the BOJ said in a full version of its quarterly outlook report.

“This suggests Japanese automakers are averting price hikes that may lead to falling sales volume, at the cost of seeing profitability worsen,” the BOJ added.

Malaysia

Malaysia’s Trade Ministry has said its rate, down from a threatened 25 percent, was a positive outcome without compromising on what it called “red line” items.

Thailand

Thailand’s finance minister said the reduction from 36 to 19 percent in tariffs, would help his country’s struggling economy face global challenges ahead.

“It helps maintain Thailand’s competitiveness on the global stage, boosts investor confidence and opens the door to economic growth, increased income and new opportunities,” Pichai Chunhavajira said.

Cambodia

The US on Friday slashed the tariff rate for Cambodia to 19 percent from earlier levies of 36 percent and 49 percent, a major boost for its crucial garments sector, its biggest economic driver and source of about a million manufacturing jobs.

“If the US maintained 49 percent or 36 percent, that industry would collapse, in my opinion,” Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister and top trade negotiator Sun Chanthol told the Reuters news agency in an interview.

European Union

The EU’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, said the bloc’s exporters now benefit from a “more competitive position” following a framework agreement between the EU and the US, although he added that “the work continues.

“The new US tariffs reflect the first results of the EU-US deal, especially the 15 percent all-inclusive tariff cap,” Sefcovic wrote in a post on social media platform X.

“This reinforces stability for businesses as well as trust in the transatlantic economy,” he added.

Switzerland

Switzerland expressed “great regret” that it was hit with 39 percent – up from the threatened 31 percent – despite its “very constructive position”.

The levy – more than double the EU’s 15 percent – appeared to catch the rich Alpine nation off guard.

Switzerland ranks sixth in terms of direct investment in the US, with pharma giants Roche and Novartis announcing major spending plans in recent months.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka expressed relief that it will face a 20 percent hit – a sharp reduction from the 44 percent originally floated – and expressed hope of a further cut.

“We are happy that our competitiveness in exports to the US has been retained,” Finance Ministry official Harshana Suriyapperuma told reporters.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh negotiated a 20 percent tariff on exports to the US, down from the 37 percent initially proposed by Trump.

Muhammad Yunus, the head of the country’s interim government, called it a “decisive diplomatic victory”.

Pakistan

Pakistan secured a tariff rate of 19 percent with the US on Thursday.

“This deal marks the beginning of a new era of economic collaboration, especially in energy, mines and minerals, IT, cryptocurrency and other sectors,” the Pakistani Finance Ministry said in a statement.

India

Trump on Wednesday said Indian goods would face a 25 percent US tariff starting August 1, slightly below an earlier threatened level.

The country would also face an unspecified “penalty” over New Delhi’s purchases of Russian weapons and energy, Trump said on social media.

In a statement, the Indian government said on Wednesday it was studying the implications of these new tariffs and added New Delhi “attaches the utmost importance to protecting and promoting the welfare of our farmers, entrepreneurs, and MSMEs”.

South Africa

South Africa will use the weeklong delay in the US’s imposition of 30 percent tariffs to negotiate, to avoid the penalty and save jobs, President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Friday.

“Intensive negotiations are now under way,” Ramaphosa told journalists.

“Our task is to negotiate as strongly and as hard as we can with the United States,” he said. “Our objective, really, is to save jobs.”

Canada

Trump said on Thursday that the US would raise tariffs on certain Canadian goods from 25 percent to 35 percent.

He had warned of trade consequences for Canada after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

Unlike the new levies hitting dozens of other economies, there is no delay, and these begin on Friday, according to a White House fact sheet.

Carney said his government is “disappointed” by Trump’s decision.

Trump’s order also cited Canada’s failure to “cooperate in curbing the ongoing flood of fentanyl and other illicit drugs” as well as its “retaliation” against his measures.

Carney outlined Ottawa’s efforts to crack down on fentanyl and to increase border security. “Canada accounts for only 1 percent of US fentanyl imports and has been working intensively to further reduce these volumes,” he said.

Products covered by the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – which covers a wide swath of items – will, however, be exempt from the tariff rate.

Markets

European stocks hit a three-week low as investors worried about the effect of the new US levies on dozens of countries.

Asian shares were also headed for the worst week since April after the tariffs were announced.

Oil prices have, however, changed very little, heading for a weekly gain.

The Valdai Discussion Club, in partnership with the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), will hold the 3rd Russian-African conference titled “Realpolitik in a Divided World: Rethinking Russia-South Africa Ties in a Global and African Context” in late July 2025. The primary goal of the conference is to form and expand communities of African and Russian experts interested in cooperation, the confidential discussion of the most pressing international issues, and the preparation of recommendations for practical foreign policy work.

It is no coincidence that South Africa has been chosen as the venue for the Valdai’s conference. In 2025, South Africa chairs the G20 summit. In preparation for the upcoming late July conference, Steven Gruzd, Head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme and the Africa-Russia Project at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), offers an insight into the current Russia-South Africa relations, the United States trade issues with Africa, and Africa’s future prospects in this rapidly changing world. Here are the interview excerpts:

The South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) will host the 3rd Russian-African conference of the Valdai Discussion Club in South Africa. Within the context of the shifting geopolitics, what would you say, in terms of current Russia-South Africa relations, its status and prospects, as one of the themes for discussion?

Steven Gruzd: SAIIA looks forward to co-hosting the Third Russian-African Conference of the Valdai Discussion Club later in July 2025. We believe that it is important to interact and engage with a variety of actors in a balanced and nuanced way. We do not believe that academic boycotts are constructive.

The event is being held against the backdrop of rapidly shifting global geopolitics and the erosion of the “rules-based international order,” as nationalism is reasserted and conflicts endure in the Great Lakes in East-Central Africa and in the Middle East.

South Africa has maintained good relations with Russia throughout the last decade, although trade remains at a relatively low level and there is much scope to improve it. Diplomatically, relations are warm and constructive, and have been enhanced by regular interaction between the two countries in both BRICS and the G20. South Africa has tried to play a mediating role in Russia’s war with Ukraine, but here it has been one voice among many and does not have much concrete to show for these efforts, as the war rages on. Nevertheless, it remains a key driver of the African Peace Initiative. At the UN, most of South Africa’s votes on the Russia-Ukraine war have been abstentions, in line with its declared non-aligned stance.

To what degree are the few points raised above influencing or reshaping Russian-African relations? Do you also think Russia is rivaling and competing with its own BRICS members, for instance, China and India, across the continent?

SG: Russia-Africa relations have been steadily growing, as the two well-attended Russia-Africa Summits in 2019 and 2023 attest to. As Russia has faced sanctions and been shunned by the West, it has sought new markets and to strengthen ties with the Global South, including in Africa. Russia supported the membership of Egypt and Ethiopia to become full BRICS members at the 2023 BRICS Summit in Johannesburg. The 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, was successful and added Algeria, Nigeria, and Uganda as “partner countries.” This was an important occasion for Russia to show that it was not internationally isolated and could still rely on many countries as friends.

The operations of the Wagner Group, especially in the Sahel, have been gradually subsumed under the Africa Corps of the Russian Ministry of Defence.

Russia has been strengthening bilateral relations with many African countries and is looking to provide peaceful-use nuclear technology to about 20 African countries. It is heavily involved in the building of a nuclear energy plant in Dabaa, Egypt.

Russia’s BRICS partners—China and India, but also the UAE and Saudi Arabia—are active on the African continent, but at this stage it seems that all are able to achieve their strategic objectives in Africa without coming into conflict with one another.

Do you view South Africa’s G20 presidency as a unique factor for fighting neo-colonialism and Western hegemony and for addressing thorny trade issues with the United States?

SG: South Africa’s G20 presidency is important. It remains the only African member state of the G20, although the African Union has joined as a full member since 2023. This is the first time that the G20 is hosted in Africa. As the president, South Africa has the ability to influence the G20’s agenda. It is the fourth developing country in a row to host the G20—after Indonesia (2022), India (2023), and Brazil (2024). It has continued several of the initiatives of these Global South states in its focus. South Africa’s priorities include strengthening disaster resilience and response, ensuring debt sustainability for low-income countries, mobilizing finance for a just energy transition, and harnessing critical minerals for inclusive growth and sustainable development. The aim is for a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient global economy.

So far, the US has not sent its top leaders to preparatory meetings in South Africa, and there is doubt whether US President Donald Trump will attend the G20 Summit in November. This threatened to damage South Africa’s leadership, but the other G20 members have rallied to support South Africa.

I do not think that the G20 is the venue to “fight neo-colonialism, Western hegemony, and trade issues with the United States,” or at least not in using that language. I think BRICS may be a more appropriate platform to air these issues. South Africa will nevertheless push the concerns of the Global South this year.

Can South Africa’s presidency change perceptions of the G20’s role in global politics and its invaluable contributions to Africa’s development?

SG: I believe South Africa is doing well in its G20 stewardship so far and will hopefully host a successful summit, which has become especially challenging in the current geopolitical environment. If Trump does not attend, it will be damaging to the G20, particularly because the US is the host for 2026. South Africa’s relations with the US have deteriorated, including over Trump’s views on the treatment of white farmers, the expulsion of Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool from Washington, and threatened high tariffs, among many other issues.

The summit will hopefully showcase South Africa and change perceptions about failed or failing African states. South Africa remains a key player in Africa, contributing to the continent’s development through peace efforts, trade, and political interactions.

But I also think South Africa should be and has been modest in its expectations of what the G20 can do during any one-year presidency. The G20 remains one of the few forums where Russia and the West still sit around the same table, and it has been challenging to reach consensus.

South-South cooperation is frequently resonating, as is the United States skipping the G20, Trump, and the new world architecture featuring in bilateral and multilateral discussions. Can African leaders change attitudes and face geopolitical development realities? Can Africa remain non-aligned? What then can we expect as future prospects, especially for Africa?

SG: There is no doubt that South-South cooperation is happening and being talked about more and more, and it is set to continue. The global environment is subject to profound geopolitical tensions, not least due to Trump’s “America First” policies, including high trade tariffs. The entire world of development assistance or foreign aid is likewise undergoing far-reaching changes. Trump has destroyed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), putting at risk or shutting down countless development projects in Africa. European countries—for a long time generous donors to Africa—are diverting billions of euros in development funding to defense and dealing with migration-related issues.

African countries will be under continual pressure to “pick a side” in what some have called the “New Cold War,” and for the most part they will continue to assert their non-aligned stances. How long they can continue on this path is unclear. And many say they are non-aligned but continue to lean closer to either the West or China and Russia in reality. African leaders are having to adjust to a rapidly changing and uncertain world, the contours of which are not entirely clear at this point. African leaders have been forced to deal with a world with less aid. Hopefully this will encourage African states to be more self-reliant, curb corruption, and pursue their national interests.

At half past eight on the morning of Friday, July 21, 1967, following a quick breakfast with his wife, Chief Albert Luthuli set out from his home in Groutville, about 70km (45 miles) from Durban in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa, on his normal daily routine.

The 69-year-old leader of the African National Congress (ANC) would “walk three kilometres to open the family’s general store in Nonhlevu, proceed to his three plots of sugarcane fields, and return to close the shop before going back home”, his daughter-in-law, Wilhelmina May Luthuli, now 77, told a new inquest into his death at Pietermaritzburg High Court in May this year. The current justice minister has reopened the inquests into several suspicious apartheid-era deaths.

Luthuli reached the store by 9:30am and set off again to check on his sugar cane fields about half an hour later.

This much is not in dispute.

The only witness

Train driver Stephanus Lategan told a 1967 inquest into Luthuli’s death that at 10:36am, as his 760-tonne train approached the Umvoti River Bridge, he noticed a pedestrian walking across the bridge and sounded his whistle. “The Bantu [the official and derogatory term for Black people at the time] did not appear to take any notice whatsoever … He had walked about … 15 or 16 paces when my engine commenced to overtake him … He made no attempt to step towards the side or turn his body sideways.”

While the bridge was not designed for pedestrian traffic, Luthuli and the rest of his family often crossed it. His son, Edgar Sibusiso Luthuli, explained that when using the bridge, his father was “very, very careful. When a train was coming, he would stand, not even walk, and hold onto the railings tightly. The space was big enough for the train to pass you on the bridge”.

But, according to Lategan, Luthuli did no such thing that morning. The train driver told the inquest that while the front of the train narrowly missed Luthuli, “the corner of the cab struck him on the right shoulder and this caused him to be spun around and I saw him lose his balance and fall between the right-hand side of the bridge and the moving train.”

Lategan was the only witness to the collision. According to his testimony, when he realised he had hit Luthuli, he stopped the train as fast as he could.

Luthuli was still breathing but unconscious and bleeding from the mouth when Lategan said he reached him. He asked the station foreman and station master to call an ambulance, which took Luthuli to the nearest “Bantu” hospital.

Fifty-eight years later – nearly another lifetime for Luthuli – a new inquest opened earlier this year. Experts testifying cast serious doubt on Lategan’s version of events.

Police crime scene analyst Brenden Burgess was part of a team that used evidence from the first inquest to reconstruct the crash scene.

“The possibility of an accident scenario occurring as described by Mr Lategan is highly unlikely,” testified Burgess. “Taking into account the stopping distance required to stop the locomotive where it came to rest at the scene … the brakes to the train would have to have been applied at least 170 metres before the entrance to the northern side of the bridge … The probability of the point of impact being on the southern side of the bridge is highly unlikely.”

In fact, experts say, it is likely that Luthuli was not walking along the bridge at all.

Steam train expert Lesley Charles Labuschagne went further. By his estimation, “Luthuli was assaulted and his body taken to a railway track so it would look like he was hit by a train,” according to a Business Day article about his testimony, published in May.

Citing “gaps relating to description of trauma, in terms of size as well as characterisation of injuries”, forensic pathologist Dr Sibusiso Ntsele told the 2025 inquest that Luthuli’s post-mortem report was “substandard to say the least”. Ntsele concluded his testimony: “I don’t have enough to say he was hit by a train … What I have suggests that he is likely to have been assaulted.”

The inquest has been adjourned until October, when Judge Qondeni Radebe will rule on Luthuli’s cause of death.

‘Quietly, as a teacher’

There is no formal record of his birth, but it is known that Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was born sometime in 1898 in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where his father worked as an interpreter for missionaries from the Congregational Church in America. This instilled in Luthuli a deep and lifelong faith and, according to the writer Nadine Gordimer, a way of speaking “with a distinct American intonation”.

When Mvumbi (his preferred name, meaning “continuous rain”) was about 10 years old, his family moved back to South Africa and he was sent to live with his uncle, the chief of Groutville, so that he could attend school.

By 1914, Luthuli was 16 and had progressed as far as he could at the small school in Groutville. He spent a year at the Ohlange Institute, the first high school in South Africa founded and run by a Black person, John Dube, the first president of the ANC. That was followed by several years at Edendale, a Methodist mission school where, for the first time, Luthuli was taught by white teachers. In his autobiography, Luthuli refuted the accusation that mission schools produced “black Englishmen”. Instead, he argued, “two cultures met, and both Africans and Europeans were affected by the meeting. Both profited and both survived enriched.”

After graduating from Edendale with a teaching qualification, he accepted a post as principal (and sole employee) of a tiny Blacks-only intermediate school in the outpost of Blaauwbosch, where – under the mentorship of a local pastor – his Christian faith deepened.

Luthuli’s performance at Blaauwbosch earned him a scholarship to Adams College, one of the most important centres for Black education in South Africa, just south of Durban.

Luthuli arrived at Adams with no political aspirations: “I took it for granted that I would spend my days quietly, as a teacher,” he wrote in his autobiography, Let My People Go. But the influence of ZK Matthews (the principal of the high school at Adams, who would go on to become an influential ANC leader and academic) and some of the other teachers gradually opened his eyes to a political world of resistance.

Luthuli stayed at Adams College for 15 years. Only in 1935 did he succumb to pressure from the people of Groutville, who wanted him to return home to take up the chieftainship (his uncle had been “fired” by the white government).

Becoming a chief – a salaried position, which meant he could be fired by the apartheid regime if he stepped too far out of line – meant taking a significant pay cut, but Luthuli saw it as a calling. Administering the needs of the 5,000 Zulu people of the Umvoti Mission Reserve, which had been founded by American missionary Reverend Aldin Grout from the Congressional Church in 1844, opened his eyes to the reality of life in South Africa: “Now I saw, almost as though for the first time, the naked poverty of my people, the daily hurt to human beings.” As the chief explained in his autobiography: “In Groutville, as all over the country, a major part of the problem is land – thirteen percent of the land for seventy percent of the people, and almost always inferior land…When I became chief I was confronted as never before by the destitution of the housewife, the smashing of families because of economic pressures, and the inability of the old way of life to meet the contemporary onslaught.”

Called to activism

Luthuli entered formal politics relatively late in life compared with others, only joining the ANC at the age of 46 in 1944, four years before apartheid officially began. Nelson Mandela, 20 years his junior, joined in the same year. Both men arrived at a time when the party was in dire need of new blood. The older generation of Black leaders was seen as too polite and accepting of the status quo to fight the increasingly draconian white minority government, with its rapidly restrictive legislation governing the lives of Black people.

But while Mandela and a few of his contemporaries shook up the national conversation with a more brash and confrontational style, Luthuli brought a more moderate brand of leadership to the Natal branch of the ANC. He was elected to the provincial executive less than a year after joining the party, and as president of the Natal branch in 1951.

Luthuli shot to national prominence as the chief volunteer of the 1952 Defiance Campaign, which saw thousands of people all around the country offering themselves up for arrest for contravening apartheid laws by doing things like sitting on whites-only benches and travelling on whites-only buses.

“He was duly stripped of his position as chief by the apartheid government, before being elected ANC president on the back of the youth vote that December,” explains Professor Thula Simpson of the University of Pretoria, one of the leading historians of the ANC. “Luthuli was seen as a bridge between old and young. But he and Moses Kotane [secretary general of the communist SACP for 39 years] became the old guard when Mandela and co started agitating for violence.”

Luthuli’s stance against violence

Mandela first publicly called for violent resistance in June 1953, telling a crowd in Sophiatown that, as he wrote in his autobiography, “violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid and we must be prepared, in the near future, to use that weapon.” This did not align with Luthuli’s approach.

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote of being “severely reprimanded” by Luthuli and the ANC’s National Executive, “for advocating such a radical departure from accepted policy [never, ever condoning violence]… Such speeches could provoke the enemy to crush the organisation entirely while the enemy was strong and we were as yet still weak. I accepted the censure, and thereafter faithfully defended the policy of nonviolence in public. But in my heart, I knew that nonviolence was not the answer.”

Luthuli was actually in court, giving evidence about the ANC’s commitment to non-violent struggle, on March 21, 1960, when white police officers opened fire on a crowd of peaceful Black protesters at Sharpeville, killing at least 91 people. After Sharpeville, the calls for violent protest within the ANC grew louder and – despite Luthuli’s opposition – in June 1961, Mandela was given permission to set up Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the party’s military wing.

MK’s founding document is “the strangest declaration of war in the history of insurgency”, says Simpson, with its focus on sabotaging government infrastructure but avoiding loss of life at all costs.

1961 was also the year Luthuli became the first African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. “The citation from the committee noted that he had consistently stood for non-violence,” says Simpson. “But the irony is that he was aware that his movement had committed to forming a sabotage squad, even if he personally had acquiesced to the decision without enthusiasm.”

The apartheid government initially prevented Luthuli from travelling to Oslo to receive the award, but eventually relented with a condition: He could not make overt mention of South African politics during his speech. He followed this restriction (he didn’t say the word “apartheid” once) but made a clear statement by wearing traditional Zulu attire.

By sheer coincidence, Luthuli’s route back from Oslo saw him arrive in Durban on 15 December: The exact evening that MK began its operations.

Despite their differences, says Simpson, “Mandela liked and respected Luthuli and felt the need to consult with him. Mandela wanted the older man’s consent, authorisation and approval…”

This close relationship would lead to Mandela’s arrest and imprisonment for 27 years. In 1961, after the banning of the ANC, Mandela went undercover. Dubbed the Black Pimpernel, he was the most wanted man in the country. In August 1962, posing as the chauffeur of white playwright and activist Cecil Williams, Mandela drove to Groutville to brief Luthuli about a military training trip he’d taken to other African countries. One of the people Mandela met on that trip was a police informant, and on their way back to Johannesburg, Mandela and Williams were ambushed by police. “I knew in that instant that my life on the run was over,” Mandela later recalled.

Rewriting history

Many anti-apartheid leaders died in suspicious circumstances over the 46 years that the apartheid regime survived. Perhaps the most famous of these was Steve Biko, who died following police torture in 1977. The official inquest into Biko’s death absolved the police, finding that he could not have died “by any act or omission involving an offence by any person”. Despite a local and international outcry, the truth would only come out at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1999, after apartheid had ended. Presided over by Desmond Tutu (himself a Nobel peace laureate), the TRC held more than 2,500 hearings between 1996 and 2002.

Controversially, the TRC had the power to grant full amnesty for politically motivated crimes, provided the perpetrators made honest and complete confessions. Four security policemen admitted to the killing of Biko at TRC hearings. But the commanding officer, Gideon Nieuwoudt, was denied amnesty on the grounds that he did not prove that his crime was politically motivated. Nieuwoudt was convicted for his role in the murder of the “Motherwell four” – four Black policemen who had been leaking information to the ANC and were killed in a car bomb planted by the authorities but died in 2005 before he was sentenced.

Since the TRC concluded, there have been other inquests into mysterious deaths, most notably the 2017 inquest into Ahmed Timol’s 1971 death. According to police reports at the time, Timol had jumped from the 10th floor of the Johannesburg Central Police Station after being overcome with shame at disclosing sensitive information about his colleagues during interrogation. A 1972 inquest ruled that he died by suicide. “To accept anything other than that the deceased jumped out of the window and fell to the ground can only be seen as ludicrous,” ruled Magistrate JL de Villiers. “Although he was questioned for long hours, he was treated in a civilised and humane manner.”

Timol’s death shone a light on the many (73 in total) mysterious deaths of activists in police custody during apartheid. These were the inspiration for Chris van Wyk’s satirical poem “In Detention”:

He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while washing.

The TRC found that there was a “strong possibility that at least some of those detainees who allegedly committed suicide by jumping out of the window were either accidentally dropped or thrown”. This was not enough for the Timol family, however, and, in 2017, they succeeded in having the 1972 inquest reopened.

On October 12, 2017, Judge Billy Mothle set a historic precedent by overturning the first inquest’s findings. Mothle ruled that “Timol’s death was brought about by an act of having been pushed from the tenth floor or the roof” of the building, and that there was a prima facie case of murder against the two policemen who interrogated Timol on the day he was pushed to his death. The policemen in question had already died, but a third – Joao Rodrigues – was charged as an accessory to the murder. Rodrigues died before his case went to trial.

Seeking a motive

The Luthuli family hope to receive similar vindication when the inquest into his death reaches its conclusion in October this year. But, looking at the case objectively, Simpson is hard-pressed to find a motive for the murder. While Luthuli was the ANC’s official leader at the time of his death in 1967, a combination of ill-health, government banning orders and his opposition to violence had rendered him something of a figurehead without much political clout by the mid-1960s.

“There’s no clear motive for his murder,” says Simpson. “He’d ceased to be a threat to the regime. If anything, his funeral was an opportunity for protest.” Of course, Simpson adds, “If there was a conspiracy, the 1967 inquest would never have found it. Even if Luthuli’s death was accidental, there’s loads of reason to doubt the apartheid government’s version.”

In 2025, Justice Minister Ronald Lamola has been on something of a mission to expose apartheid-era cover-ups. On the same day that the Luthuli inquest was reopened, he announced plans to reopen the inquests into the deaths of Mlungisi Griffiths Mxenge in 1981 (a civil rights lawyer who was stabbed 45 times by a police “death squad”) and Booi Mantyi, who was shot dead for allegedly throwing stones at police in 1985. Last month, the inquest into the 1985 murder of the “Cradock Four” was reopened.

While most of the perpetrators of apartheid-era crimes are now dead (or very old), Lamola is pressing ahead. “With these inquests, we open very real wounds which are more difficult to open 30 years into our democracy,” he said. “But nonetheless, the interest of justice can never be bound by time…the truth must prevail.”

Uncovering the truth is especially important for Luthuli’s family. “It’s a very exciting moment for us,” said Sandile Luthuli, the chief’s grandson and CEO of the Social Housing Regulatory Authority. Now in his early 50s, Sandile doesn’t have memories of his grandfather, but talks about Luthuli being deeply religious: “He conducted church services on his own.” He also highlights the role that Luthuli’s wife, Nokukhanya, played in “keeping the home fires burning”.

While Sandile does admit to “some anxiety” about the outcome of the inquest, he is confident it will finally set the record straight. “This is the moment that we have been waiting for as a family … to really peel the layers of … his untimely assassination at the hands of the apartheid government.”

The inquest has also reminded the nation of South Africa and the world at large of Luthuli’s incredible legacy. As Martin Luther King Jr wrote in a letter to Luthuli in 1959: “You have stood amid persecution, abuse, and oppression with a dignity and calmness of spirit seldom paralleled in human history. One day all of Africa will be proud of your achievements.”

Debt is holding back economic growth for many low income countries. When South Africa took over the Group of 20 presidency last year, it promised it would take on that challenge, improve food security and represent African nations from the head of the table.

As the G20’s finance ministers meet in Durban without the United States Treasury secretary and with just four months left in its term, has South Africa lived up to those promises?

Can organisations like the G20 ever really bring about change?

And in a transactional global economy, has South Africa’s leadership role come just as organisations like this matter less?

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The United States sent five migrants it describes as “barbaric” criminals to the African nation of Eswatini in an expansion of the Trump administration’s largely secretive third-country deportation program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday.

The U.S. has already deported eight men to another African country, South Sudan, after the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on sending people to countries where they have no ties. The South Sudanese government has declined to say where those men, also described as violent criminals, are after it took custody of them nearly two weeks ago.

In a late-night post on X, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the five men sent to Eswatini, who are citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen and Laos, had arrived on a plane, but didn’t say when or where.

She said they were all convicted criminals and “individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.”

The men “have been terrorizing American communities” but were now “off of American soil,” McLaughlin added.

McLaughlin said they had been convicted of crimes including murder and child rape and one was a “confirmed” gang member. Her social media posts included mug shots of the men and what she said were their criminal records and sentences. They were not named.

It was not clear if the men had been deported from prison or if they were detained in immigration operations, and the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t immediately respond to requests for clarification.

Four of the five countries where the men are from have historically been resistant to taking back some citizens when they’re deported from the U.S. That issue has been a reoccurring problem for Homeland Security even before the Trump administration. Some countries refuse to take back any of their citizens, while others won’t accept people who have committed crimes in the U.S.

Like in South Sudan, there was no immediate comment from Eswatini authorities over any deal to accept third-country deportees or what would happen to them in that country. Civic groups there raised concerns over the secrecy from a government long accused of clamping down on human rights.

“There has been a notable lack of official communication from the Eswatini government regarding any agreement or understanding with the U.S. to accept these deportees,” Ingiphile Dlamini, a spokesperson for the pro-democracy group SWALIMO, said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.

It wasn’t clear if they were being held in a detention center, what their legal status was or what Eswatini’s plans were for the deported men, he said.

An absolute monarchy

Eswatini, previously called Swaziland, is a country of about 1.2 million people between South Africa and Mozambique. It is one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies and the last in Africa. King Mswati III has ruled by decree since 1986.

Political parties are effectively banned and pro-democracy groups have said for years that Mswati III has crushed political dissent, sometimes violently.

Pro-democracy protests erupted in Eswatini in 2021, when dozens were killed, allegedly by security forces. Eswatini authorities have been accused of conducting political assassinations of pro-democracy activists and imprisoning others.

Because Eswatini is a poor country, it “may face significant strain in accommodating and managing individuals with complex backgrounds, particularly those with serious criminal convictions,” Dlamini said.

While the U.S. administration has hailed deportations as a victory for the safety and security of the American people, Dlamini said his organization wanted to know the plans for the five men sent to Eswatini and “any potential risks to the local population.”

U.S. is seeking more deals

The Trump administration has said it is seeking more deals with African nations to take deportees from the U.S. Leaders from some of the five West African nations who met last week with President Trump at the White House said the issue of migration and their countries possibly taking deportees from the U.S. was discussed.

Some nations have pushed back. Nigeria, which wasn’t part of that White House summit, said it has rejected pressure from the U.S. to take deportees who are citizens of other countries.

The U.S. also has sent hundreds of Venezuelans and others to Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama, but has identified Africa as a continent where it might find more governments willing to strike deportation agreements.

Rwanda’s foreign minister told the AP last month that talks were underway with the U.S. about a potential agreement to host deported migrants. A British government plan announced in 2022 to deport rejected asylum-seekers to Rwanda was ruled illegal by the U.K. Supreme Court last year.

‘Not a dumping ground’

The eight men deported by the U.S. to war-torn South Sudan, where they arrived early this month, previously spent weeks at a U.S. military base in nearby Djibouti, located on the northeast border of Ethiopia, as the case over the legality of sending them there played out.

The deportation flight to Eswatini is the first to a third country since the Supreme Court ruling cleared the way.

The South Sudanese government has not released details of its agreement with the U.S. to take deportees, nor has it said what will happen to the men. A prominent civil society leader there said South Sudan was “not a dumping ground for criminals.”

Analysts say some African nations might be willing to take third-country deportees in return for more favorable terms from the U.S. in negotiations over tariffs, foreign aid and investment, and restrictions on travel visas.

Imray and Gumede write for the Associated Press. Gumede reported from Johannesburg. AP writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.

Francesca Albanese addresses delegates from 30 countries to discuss ways nations can try to stop Israel’s offensive.

The United Nations’s special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territories has said that it is time for nations around the world to take concrete actions to stop Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.

Francesca Albanese spoke to delegates from 30 countries meeting in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, on Tuesday to discuss Israel’s brutal assault and ways nations can try to stop the offensive in the besieged enclave.

Many of the participating nations have described Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide against the Palestinians.

More than 58,000 people have been killed since Israel launched the assault in October 2023, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israeli forces have also imposed several total blockades on the territory throughout the war, pushing Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to the brink of starvation.

“Each state must immediately review and suspend all ties with the State of Israel … and ensure its private sector does the same,” Albanese said. “The Israeli economy is structured to sustain the occupation that has now turned genocidal.”

The two-day conference organised by Colombia and South Africa is being attended mostly by developing nations, although Spain, Ireland and China have also sent delegates.

The conference is co-chaired by South Africa and Colombia, which last year suspended coal exports to Israeli power plants. It includes the participation of members of The Hague Group, a coalition of eight countries that earlier this year pledged to cut military ties with Israel and comply with an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

For decades, South Africa’s governing African National Congress party has compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank with its own history of oppression under the harsh apartheid regime of white minority rule, which restricted most Black people to areas called “homelands”, before ending in 1994.

The gathering comes as the European Union weighs various measures against Israel, which include a ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements, an arms embargo and individual sanctions against Israeli officials who are found to be blocking a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Colombian Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs Mauricio Jaramillo said on Monday that the nations participating in the Bogota meeting, which also include Qatar and Turkiye, will be discussing diplomatic and judicial measures to put more pressure on Israel to cease its attacks.

The Colombian official described Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as an affront to the international order.

“This is not just about Palestine,” Jaramillo said in a news conference. “It is about defending international law and the right to self-determination.”

Special rapporteur Albanese’s comments echoed remarks she made earlier on Tuesday addressed to the EU. The bloc’s foreign ministers had been meeting in Brussels to discuss possible action against Israel.

In a series of posts on X, Albanese wrote that the EU is “legally bound” to suspend its association agreement with Israel, citing its obligations under international law.

Albanese said the EU is not only Israel’s top trading partner but also its top investment partner, nearly double the size of the US, and “trade with an economy inextricably tied to occupation, apartheid and genocide is complicity”.

Cape Town, South Africa – When Patricia Blows heard a senior police official’s explosive allegations against South Africa’s political and law enforcement elite last week, her thoughts went straight to the stalled investigation into her son’s killing nine years ago.

Angelo, an apprentice boilermaker, was about to turn 28 when he was shot in an apparent robbery on a Sunday afternoon in March 2016 while walking home from work in Langlaagte, Johannesburg.

To this day, the investigation has gone nowhere despite Blows providing the police with evidence they said they lacked, including witness statements she collected herself.

The lack of progress in the case began to make sense last week when the police commissioner in coastal KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, claimed he had uncovered a crime syndicate involving politicians, senior police officers, correctional services officials, prosecutors, the judiciary and businesspeople in his province.

According to Mkhwanazi, speaking at a news conference on July 6, the systemic corruption rises all the way to the country’s police minister, Senzo Mchunu, whom he accused of disbanding a task force set up to investigate political killings in KZN to protect his shady associates.

Like millions of South Africans, Blows was outraged by Mkhwanazi’s allegations – but not entirely surprised.

“I immediately thought of our battle for justice. I just couldn’t find an open door. It still hurts like hell,” said Blows, a community activist from Blackheath on the Cape Flats, a part of Cape Town plagued by violent drug-trafficking gangs.

“I had fresh hope in Mchunu. Now this? Then doubt drifted in, and I had an overwhelming fear for [Mkhwanazi’s] safety,” Blows said from her suburb on the outskirts of the Cape Flats, where a police station came under attack about a month ago, presumably in retaliation for the arrest of a local crime boss.

‘Hands off Mkhwanazi’

Mkhwanazi’s revelations triggered an outpouring of support from crime-weary South Africans and politicians alike, who almost universally admire his no-nonsense approach to crime. Last month, after a series of police shootouts with criminals, he was quoted as saying he cared more about impact than strategy.

His popularity reflects a national malaise as well as a regional one that is particular to volatile KZN. The province regularly features among the country’s crime hotspots and is notorious for its history of political violence that dates back to the 1980s when the apartheid regime fomented tensions among the Black supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) and its rival Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in an attempt to undermine the planned transition to democracy.

National quarterly statistics for January to March indicated a decrease in violent crime compared with the same quarter in 2024. Murders decreased by 12.4 percent to 5,727, or an average of 64 per day, according to the Institute for Security Studies.

Still, violent crime is a major problem. According to the World Population Review, South Africa has the fifth highest crime index in the world, following Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan and Haiti.

South Africa also ranks 82nd in the world on the corruption perception index compiled by the NGO Transparency International.

In this context, Mkhwanazi has become a hero to many South Africans who are fed up with the government’s failure to address chronic social ills.

Not even an investigation into his conduct in March could dampen the support for Mkhwanazi. The Independent Police Investigative Directorate dropped the case after a “Hands off Mkhwanazi” campaign, which was revived on social media after his July 6 news conference.

Dressed in special operations fatigues and surrounded by armed guards, Mkhwanazi told journalists: “I am combat ready. I will die for this badge. I will not back down.”

Ramaphosa’s legacy at risk

Much to the frustration of many South Africans, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s response to the unfolding crisis has been in sharp contrast to Mkhwanazi’s gung-ho attitude.

In a brief and carefully crafted televised address on Sunday, Ramaphosa announced that Mchunu had been placed on special leave and he would establish a judicial commission of inquiry to look into the allegations raised by Mkhwanazi.

Kagiso Pooe, a senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Governance in Johannesburg, was hoping for Mchunu to be suspended or fired and the country’s seemingly compromised security structure to be overhauled, especially after the recent arrest of a senior crime intelligence official and several officers for fraud.

Pooe believes Ramaphosa played it safe to preserve himself and his ANC party, which was forced to form a coalition government with rivals after it failed to secure an outright majority in last year’s general election. It was a historic defeat for Nelson Mandela’s party, which has dominated domestic politics since the democratic era began in 1994.

Before local government elections next year, Pooe believes the last thing Ramaphosa wants is to alienate an ally like Mchunu, who has a strong support base in the highly contested KZN and helped secure Ramaphosa’s presidency in 2017.

“He doesn’t rock the boat. It’s not in his nature,” Pooe said, pointing out that Ramaphosa is determined to accomplish what no president has managed to do since 1994 – complete a second term in office.

“I give the president 33 percent, which is the average score for everything he does,” he said.

Pooe bemoaned the idea of yet another commission of inquiry under Ramaphosa. In May, the president even appointed a commission to investigate the by-product of a previous commission set up in 1996 that failed to deal with apartheid-era crimes. Decades on, more than 100 cases that arose from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have yet to be prosecuted.

The most high-profile commission under Ramaphosa was established shortly after he took office in 2017. The Zondo Commission was meant to investigate corruption that was so deeply entrenched under Ramaphosa’s predecessor Jacob Zuma that it became known as “state capture”.

After millions of dollars and years of highly publicised testimony, the findings of the commission have yet to deliver a major prosecution.

Toyin Adetiba, a professor at the University of Zululand’s Department of Political and International Studies, said Ramaphosa could pay a dear price for failing to act decisively, especially at a time when he is trying to burnish South Africa’s international reputation and fend off the threat of potentially damaging tariffs from the United States.

“Remember, he will soon be out as the president of the country and that of the ANC. The respect that he commands among political leaders across the continent will suffer a setback, and for him to play the role of elder statesperson after leaving office will be a Herculean task as no one will respect his opinion, no matter how important and genuine it might be,” Adetiba said.

In a strange twist of timing, this crisis comes as the country marks the anniversary of the July 2021 unrest when riots broke out in two of the country’s most populous provinces – KZN and Gauteng – after Zuma’s imprisonment for contempt of court following his refusal to testify before the Zondo Commission.

The leader of the minority party Freedom Front Plus, Pieter Groenewald, blamed the unrest on a failure of the intelligence services. Pooe said Mkhwanazi’s allegations supported the view that the country’s intelligence has been compromised.

“South Africa is literally naked intelligence-wise. Think about it from the perspective of foreign entities and criminals,” Pooe said. “If this [the allegations of corruption] is happening, don’t you think criminals also know that you can take advantage of a country like South Africa?”

As the country processes Ramaphosa’s much-awaited speech in response to Mkhwanazi’s allegations and wonders what is to come, Blows is recovering from the shock of another shooting in her neighbourhood, reported on a community WhatsApp group. This time, it sounded like an automatic weapon was used.

“I seriously pray daily against the high crime. Many parents suffer as I do,” Blows said. “Our lives are controlled by crime.”

It might seem bizarre to speak of hope in these dark times. In Palestine, the horror of genocidal violence is coupled with the sickening acquiescence of Western powers to it. In Sudan, war rages, with the people of Darfur once again facing war crimes on a mass scale. While in the United States, the blitzkrieg advance of broligarchic authoritarianism has caught many by surprise and left devastation in its wake.

Yet, hope there is. For, across the icy ground of political repression and reaction, the green shoots of possibility are poking through, with movements of various sorts pointing towards a paradigm shift that places people before profit and, in so doing, charts a pathway for progressives.

The latest example is the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic Party’s primary election for New York’s mayoral race. Mamdani was successful because he focused on the economic difficulties faced by the poor and middle class and promised free, foundational basics, like public transport and childcare. Importantly, he proposed paying for all this by raising taxes on corporations and the rich.

In the United Kingdom, after years in the wilderness, progressives of various sorts are rallying behind Zack Polanski’s bid to lead the Green Party. After he announced his intention to contest the leadership seat, party membership jumped by 8 percent in the first month alone, as people embraced his call to rein in corporate power, tax the rich, and make sure that the state serves the 99 percent instead of the 1, now and in our climate-threatened future.

In the Global South, similar trends are in evidence. In India, in the last election, the Congress party finally managed to stem the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s saffron tide by promising unconditional income support to each poor family alongside universal, cashless health insurance. This came after one of the world’s largest basic income trials, conducted in Hyderabad, produced hugely exciting results that fed into Congress’s thinking, with policies to be funded by more redistributive taxation.

Likewise, in South Africa, the inheritors of the country’s anti-apartheid struggle have built a nationwide movement to demand extension of what was initially an emergency relief grant during the COVID-19 pandemic into a permanent basic income designed to ensure economic security for all. Aside from increasing progressive taxation, one of the more exciting ideas to emerge from this struggle for economic justice has been to frame (and fund) the basic income as a “rightful share” due to all citizens as their portion of the country’s wealth.

What unites all these various developments?

To begin to make sense of them, we first need to remind ourselves that the two fundamental questions of all politics are simply who gets what and who decides. In our present global capitalist order, the (very) rich decide, and they allocate most of the wealth that exists to themselves. In turn, like rulers throughout the ages, they pit the have-nots against those who have even less, maintaining their dominance through divide-and-rule.

At the heart of this strategy sits a foundational lie, which is repeated ad infinitum by the corporate misinformation architecture. The lie is: there is not enough to go around, because we live in a world of scarcity. From this awful premise stems the violent division of the world into “us” and “them”, the line between one and the other determining who will and will not have access to what is needed to live a decent life. From there, it is a short step to the disciplinary notion of “deservingness”, which adds the veneer of moral justification to otherwise uncomfortable exclusions.

The contemporary rise of the far right is little more than an expression of these foundational tensions. When people struggle en masse to make ends meet, they demand more, and when they do, those who control the purse strings as well as the narrative double down on the story that in a world of scarcity, people can only have more if some other, “less deserving”, people have none.

In this historical tragedy, the far right plays a treacherous role, protecting the rich and powerful from discontent by sowing division among the dispossessed. While the centre-left – long the hapless accomplice – plays that of the useful idiot, unquestioning in its acceptance of the founding myth of scarcity and thus condemned to forever attempt the impossible: treating the symptoms of inequality without ever addressing its underlying cause.

The alternative to this doom-loop politics is obvious when you stop to think about it, and it is what distinguishes each of the exciting examples noted above. The first step is a clear, confident affirmation of what most of us intuitively know to be true – that abundant wealth exists in our world. Indeed, the numbers make clear that there is more than enough to go around. The issue, of course, is just that this wealth is poorly distributed, with the top 1 percent controlling more than 95 percent of the rest of humanity, with many corporations richer than countries, and with those trends only set to worsen as the hyper-elite write the rules and rig the political game.

The second, most vital, step is to put the question of distribution back at the centre of politics. If common people struggle to make ends meet in spite of abundant wealth, then it is only because some have too much while most do not have enough.

This is exactly what progressives in the US, the UK, India, and South Africa have been doing, evidently to great effect. And this should be no surprise – the data shows again and again that equality is popular, voters like fairness, and overwhelmingly people support limits to extreme wealth.

The third step is to frame progressive demands as policies that meet people’s basic needs. What unites free childcare, healthcare, and transport? Quite simply, each of these straightforward measures will disproportionately benefit the poor, working majority and will do so precisely because they represent unavoidable everyday expenses that constrain common people’s spending power. By the same token, basic income is attractive both because it is simple and because it offers the promise of foundational economic security for the majority who presently lack it.

Yet what also unites these policy proposals and the platforms they have come to represent is that they are all in important ways unconditional. It is difficult to overstate how radical this is: almost every aspect of global social policy is conditional in one sense or another. The guaranteed provision of foundational basics to all without exclusion goes against the very idea of scarcity and its craven companion, deservingness.

What it says is that we all deserve because we are all human, and because of that, we shall use the resources that exist to make sure that we all have at least the basics that make up for a decent life.

In this radical message, hope abounds. Our task now is to nurture it and help it to grow.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

President Ramaphosa’s move follows accusations that Senzo Mchunu interfered with sensitive investigations.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has suspended his police minister “with immediate effect” over corruption allegations, a week after a provincial police chief made the accusations.

In a country facing endemic corruption, Sunday’s announcement was highly anticipated after a week of speculation over the fate of Senzo Mchunu, who became police minister a year ago after the general elections.

Mchunu, 67, who local media had suggested as a potential candidate from the centrist faction of the African National Congress (ANC) to succeed Ramaphosa, has rejected the allegations as “insinuations made without evidence or due processes”.

Ramaphosa also established a judicial commission of inquiry, with reports expected after three and six months.

“The commission will investigate the role of current or former senior officials in certain institutions who may have aided or abetted the alleged criminal activity, failed to act on credible intelligence or internal warnings, or benefitted financially or politically from a syndicate’s operations,” Ramaphosa said during a televised address.

Widespread corruption claims

KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi alleged on July 6 that Mchunu received payments from a corruption suspect.

Mkhwanazi also accused him of having played a role in dismantling a team investigating killings that shielded politically connected people.

The commissioner, speaking at a media briefing flanked by armed security forces, some with their faces masked, said he had opened a criminal investigation into the minister. He also accused other officials of obstructing police work against organised crime.

Mkhwanazi himself is under investigation for allegations of corruption in the awarding of a bulletproof vest contract, the weekly Sunday Times reported.

Firoz Cachalia, a law professor and member of the governing ANC, has been appointed as the interim police minister.

South Africa ranks 82nd in the world, according to the corruption perception index of the NGO Transparency International.

Most opposition parties on Sunday criticised Ramaphosa for putting Mchunu on a leave of absence instead of firing him.

“This was an opportunity to take South Africans into confidence, and to deal with these issues decisively. Instead, he calls for a commission of inquiry and expects South Africans to be patient when people are dying on a daily basis,” said Nhlamulo Ndhlela, the spokesperson of the opposition MK Party.

Hout Bay in Cape Town is a stunning seaside spot that’s a must-visit for anyone travelling to South Africa – but there’s a near-perfect alternative much closer to home

A Welsh coastal gem bears a striking resemblance to the breathtaking Hout Bay in Cape Town, South Africa.

With its spectacular scenery and crystal-clear azure waters, Hout Bay has established itself as an essential destination for travellers exploring South Africa. Yet there’s a remarkably similar shoreline much nearer to home for holidaymakers seeking an affordable getaway.

North Wales’s Porthdinllaen, featuring the magnificent Morfa Nefyn Beach, serves as Britain’s answer to Hout Bay, according to staycation specialists at holidaycottages.co.uk.

Both Porthdinllaen and Hout Bay are enchanting coastal settlements renowned for their golden sandy shores and dramatic clifftops, each boasting a lively local character with thriving harbours.

Porthdinllaen, much like its South African counterpart, provides an ideal spot for wildlife observation, and whilst you won’t encounter any penguins as some fortunate Hout Bay visitors have, there’s still an abundance of creatures to discover, including seals, sand martins, and oystercatchers.

The Welsh coastal destination also appeals to those eager to enjoy a dip in the ocean or participate in more thrilling water activities such as kayaking and snorkelling.

Visitors to Porthdinllaen must make sure to grab a bite at The Ty Coch Inn, a quaint red-brick establishment situated on its own stretch of sandy coastline, which has been described as “world-class” and “magical” by guests. Dog owners will be chuffed to hear that Morfa Nefyn is a dog-friendly beach, but do remember to keep your furry friend on a lead near the Ty Coch area.

The beach has been showered with praise on TripAdvisor, with one holidaymaker commenting: “Fantastic views, beautiful beach. Ideal for kayaking and paddle boarding. Lovely pub on the beach selling good homemade food. Naturally gets busy at peak times, bank holidays etc.”

Another visitor remarked: “I thought that this was a particularly good beach. It had sand, sea, boats, old buildings and mountainous views. It is definitely worth a go, if you are out that way.”

A third reviewer shared: “We were staying in a nearby holiday cottage and had a quiet, scenic, pleasant walk on a January morning. With it being out of season, it was pleasant having the entire place to ourselves for the walk. Would be lovely to visit again in better weather and with a picnic.”

Embeth Davidtz’s home is so quiet. Nestled in Brentwood Park, the 59-year-old actor’s spacious yet cozy place feels like a sanctuary, the skylight in her kitchen offering plentiful afternoon sun. Once owned by Julie Andrews, the house is where Davidtz feels most comfortable. It’s taken most of her life to find somewhere that made her feel that way.

“I seldom leave,” she says, smiling. “I’m not someone who likes to run around. I like being here.”

She’s lived in this house for about 20 years — it’s where she and her husband raised their children, now 22 and 19. She moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and before then, hers was a completely different world. Lately, that world has rarely been far from her thoughts.

In the early 1970s, when Davidtz was eight years old, she moved from America with her South African parents to Pretoria, in the midst of that country’s apartheid system. Long wanting to come to terms with the institutional racism she witnessed during her childhood, she has done something that previously had never held much interest: write and direct a movie. Pivoting from an on-screen career of stellar, precise performances in movies like “Schindler’s List,” “Junebug” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Davidtz has at last made a directorial debut with “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” (in theaters Friday), a gripping and somber drama based on Alexandra Fuller’s acclaimed 2001 memoir about growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The film is about Fuller’s family, but it’s also very much about the lessons Davidtz never wants to stop learning herself.

“It’s a constant processing,” she says of how she is always reckoning with her past. “I think I’ll probably have to grapple with it till the day that I die — what I remember seeing.”

Davidtz, Lexi Venter and Rob Van Vuuren in the movie “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.”

(Coco Van Oppens / Sony Pictures Classics)

Set in 1980, the year that the African region known as Rhodesia, ruled by a white minority, would become the independent nation of Zimbabwe, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” features Davidtz as Nicola, an angry, alcoholic policewoman whose privileged life crumbles as the Zimbabwean War upends the country’s racial power imbalance. However, the movie is not told from Nicola’s perspective but instead, from that of Bobo, her 8-year-old daughter (played with beguiling immediacy by newcomer Lexi Venter), who reflects Fuller’s own blinkered worldview at the time. As Bobo provides voice-over narration, we witness a disturbingly naturalized culture of colonialism in which our main character, a seemingly innocent child, bikes through town with a rifle slung on her back and parrots the racist attitudes espoused by white landowners around her.

Zimbabwe isn’t South Africa, but when Davidtz read Fuller’s stark memoir, the similarities of racial injustice were striking.

“She cuts you off at the knees,” says Davidtz. “You recognize it, then you feel shame.”

Davidtz was born in Indiana, but after some time in New Jersey, her family moved to Pretoria when she was eight. Her 17 years in South Africa left their mark. Even though she’d never written a screenplay before “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” she had been working on something about her upbringing. But after reading Fuller’s memoir, Davidtz says, “I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s the definitive book on it. I’m never going to be able to write a book like that.’”

“I wouldn’t say mine was a happy childhood,” she continues. “I think it was very unhappy in ways. Did I love Africa? Yes. But was it an idyllic childhood? No.”

Bobo’s bigoted views — the girl has come to believe Black people don’t have last names and are secretly terrorists — weren’t what Davidtz experienced growing up. “My family didn’t act that same way, they didn’t speak that same way, but you were part of the system by being there,” she says.

Like Bobo’s family, Davidtz did not enjoy many luxuries, except in comparison to the help around her. “If you had servants in your home, you were part of the system,” she says. “[My parents] certainly were not out marching for civil rights. They fell in that gray area.”

Not that Davidtz excludes herself from the racist mindset that’s evident in Bobo, who enjoys spending time with her family’s housekeeper, Sarah (Zikhona Bali), despite treating her as beneath her. That relationship picked an emotional scab for Davidtz. “There’s uncomfortable memories that I have,” she admits. “I remember playing with [Black] children and being bossy and being just an a—hole.”

Her personal connection to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” goes deeper. Fuller’s mother was a drinker; in Davidtz’s family, it was her father, who studied applied mathematics and physics in the States. She sees his alcoholism as the byproduct of an idealism that got crushed.

“He was a physical chemist; he was a scientist,” she says, “and his whole thought was this altruistic thing of, ‘I’m going to take everything that I’ve learned and bring it back [to South Africa].’ That’s where the alcoholism emerged. That government that was running South Africa really tightly controlled everything that my father did. I think they were highly suspicious of somebody coming from America. He very much felt his wings were clipped. And so the bottle got raised.” (These days are happier ones for her dad: “He’s medicated; he’s calmer,” she says. “He doesn’t drink anymore.”)

“This [performance] was hard and it was scary, but it was necessary,” Davidtz says of her turn in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” as a racist farm owner in Rhodesia.

(Matt Seidel / For The Times)

Davidtz can’t quite pinpoint where her passion for performing originated. “No one else has it,” she says of her family. “I really think that 7-year-old me sat in my living room in New Jersey watching the ‘Sonny & Cher’ show. Cher with that hair was just the most glamorous, amazing thing I’d ever seen. And then, suddenly, we land in this dirty, dusty farmhouse with my dad in decline and no television.”

Davidtz escaped Pretoria — at least in her mind — by going to the movies, including an early, formative screening of “Doctor Zhivago,” David Lean’s 1965 historical romance. “My mind was blown by the sweep, the story, the epicness,” she recalls. “Maybe I wanted, somehow, to remove myself from that dirt and squalor and aspire to something.”

“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” doesn’t contain the gratuitous violence you often see in films about racism. In its place is a codified class structure ruled by its white characters, who strongly encourage the locals to vote for approved candidates in the upcoming election in order to maintain the status quo. But once revolutionary Robert Mugabe comes to power, that old system gives way, leading to an unsettling scene in which Nicola wields a whip to keep Black Africans off what she considers to be her farm.

The questionable optics of a white woman telling a story about Zimbabwe entered Davidtz’s mind. She did her homework about the region, even though she ultimately had to shoot in South Africa because of Zimbabwe’s current political unrest. She spoke with her cinematographer, Willie Nel, about how the film had to look.

“I need the light shining through her eyes like that,” Davidtz remembers. “I want the closeup on the filthy fingernails. This is the way Peter Weir gets in super-close, how Malick [shows] skies and nature.” And she made sure to center her pessimistic coming-of-age narrative on the white characters, condemning them — including young Bobo.

“I don’t think a Black filmmaker could tell the experience of a white child,” she says. “I think only a white filmmaker could tell that. [Bobo] misunderstands a lot of what [the Black characters are] doing. That was deliberate — I tried to handle that really carefully. I’m certainly not trying to make the white child sympathetic in any way.”

She was just as adamant that Nicola be an utterly unlikable, virulent bigot. “You needed her to be diabolical in order to show what really was happening there,” says Davidtz. “I saw people behave like that.”

This isn’t the first time she’s played the villain, but she wanted to ensure there was nothing sympathetic or devilishly appealing about Nicola. Recalling her portrayal of the superficial, materialistic Mary Crawford in the 1999 adaptation of “Mansfield Park,” Davidtz observes, “She was just cheerfully going about her life — being diabolical, but with a smile. She was charming. That was more acceptable, more palatable.” She allowed none of that here, tapping into the desperation of a woman whose self-worth is wrapped up in the subjugation of those around her.

The veteran actress has often done terrific work by going small, her breakthrough coming as a Jewish maid prized by Ralph Fiennes’ sadistic Nazi in 1993’s “Schindler’s List.” More recently Davidtz has earned rave reviews in series like “Ray Donovan” and “The Morning Show.” She doesn’t do showy and she’s the same in person, appealingly modest and soft-spoken. But in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” she gives a boldly brazen performance as Nicola, a portrait of ugly, entitled hatred. Although Davidtz felt anxious playing such a demonstratively racist character — especially around her Black cast — she also found it a refreshing change from how she usually approaches a role.

“This [performance] was hard and it was scary, but it was necessary,” she says, Getting herself to such a dark place for “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” was easy, though. The trick? “I didn’t have time,” she says. “Everything was focused on only the three hours [a day] that I had with the kid. It was like, ‘I got to get this quick,’ and I was on my last nerve, which was great for the character — I was pretty worn down by the time we shot a lot of my stuff.”

“When you’ve been in a place where things have been so wrong, you spot it really quickly in other places,” Davidtz says of injustices occurring both in America and abroad. The actor and director is photographed at home with her two rescue dogs, Parfait (front) and Zoomie.

(Matt Seidel / For The Times)

Similarly to “The Zone of Interest,” which Davidtz reveres (“I love that film,” she declares, awed), “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” illustrates the insidiousness of bigotry by stripping away the simplistic moralizing. Bobo, her parents and the other white settlers benefit from an unjust system, always presented matter-of-factly, as the adults relish their domestic bliss at the expense of the indentured locals. I ask Davidtz if she’s showing us what everyday evil looks like.

“Evil’s a strong word,” she replies. “I’d say ‘oblivious’ or ‘unconscious’ or ‘culpable.’ It’s all of the above. I really wanted to reveal something the way ‘The Zone of Interest’ revealed something. It’s the casual racism. An ordinary person watching [the film] goes, ‘Oh, my God, that was normal to them. That was their normal.’ Then you see the full picture. Then, the evil of it shows up.”

In her memoir, author Fuller writes about her later political awakening, a process Davidtz underwent as well. “I saw moments around me — horrible, violent police arresting men on the streets, the people chucked into the back of police vans,” she says. “Just that terrified feeling inside and knowing, ‘If you’re white, you’re safe. If you’re Black, you’re not.’ Then as I got older, [there was] the disconnect between what I’m seeing and what is right.”

According to Davidtz, “the scales fell off” once she attended South Africa’s liberal Rhodes University in the early 1980s and started taking part in protest marches. “I felt like that was the big awakening,” she says, “but it’s an awakening that continues.”

There is one frequent sound in the calm oasis of Davidtz’s home: the chatter of news broadcasts. “It’s often on in the background,” she says, “but I think it’s a habit that’s eroding my peace of mind.” She admits to the same conflicted feelings many in Los Angeles have, a desire to stay informed of everything that’s happening — the ongoing war in Gaza, the stories out of Ukraine, the violent ICE raids in Southern California — but not succumb to despair and anger. No amount of quiet can tune out the world, and Davidtz doesn’t want to.

“When you’ve been in a place where things have been so wrong, you spot it really quickly in other places,” she says of the injustices occurring both here and abroad. “One thing that we can do is say what we think.” Remembering her own childhood, and pondering what prompted her to make this movie, she suggests, “I think it comes from watching something silently for a long time. I think that part of me will never want to not say, ‘I don’t think this is right.’”

With “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Davidtz is speaking up, but she knows those bad old days aren’t over. In fact, they’ve never been so present. As the film ends, Bobo takes one last look at the town and the locals that shaped her. There’s a glimmer of hope that, one day, this girl will outgrow the racism she’s ingested. But the land — and the pain — remains. Davidtz has not allowed herself to look away.

The 17th BRICS summit is being held in Brazil, again aiming to balance Western economic power and political dominance.

But as the meetings take place, eyes are on the US and President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, perhaps showing America still holds the cards.

While the host nation Brazil condemns Israel’s aggression and NATO’s increased defence spending, other countries are not so outspoken.

And two important faces are not attending – Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

So does BRICS still have a cohesive purpose?

Has the grouping made tangible achievements over the years since it launched in 2009?

And what can it realistically hope to do, in today’s world?

Presenter:

James Bays

Guests:

Gustavo Ribeiro – Founder and editor-in-chief of The Brazilian Report

Sergey Markov –  Director at the Institute of Political Studies in Moscow and former public spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin

Jayant Menon – Former lead economist at Asian Development Bank and visiting senior fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore

Brazil’s President Lula responded to Trump’s tariff threats by saying the world does not ‘want an emperor’ who lashes out over the internet.

United States President Donald Trump has threatened to hike tariffs against the BRICS economic bloc, after the group offered indirect criticism of trade wars and the recent military attacks in Iran.

On Monday, Trump took aim at the 10-member bloc, which seeks to strengthen emerging economies, framing its interests as adversarial to the US’s.

“Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff,” Trump wrote in a post. “There will be no exceptions to this policy. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

BRICS is named for its founding members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. But it has grown to include other countries including Indonesia, Egypt, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Over the weekend, the group held its 17th summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The meeting culminated in a declaration angled at promoting peace and global cooperation.

But several items in the joint declaration appeared aimed at the US and its ally Israel, even though neither was identified by name. Under a section entitled “Strengthening Multilateralism and Reforming Global Governance”, for instance, the BRICS leaders called out the increasing use of tariffs in global trade.

This seemed directed at Trump, who has threatened US trading partners with a suite of tariffs in order to negotiate more favourable trade deals and exact policy concessions.

The US president has also called tariffs “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary”, though many economists warn the cost of such import taxes is often offset onto consumers.

Trump has also championed the use of other protectionist economic policies, under the banner of his “America First” agenda. But the BRICS leaders warned that these kinds of policies could backfire.

“We voice serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO [World Trade Organization] rules,” the BRICS leaders said in their statement.

Such measures, they continued could “reduce global trade, disrupt global supply chains, and introduce uncertainty into international economic and trade activities, potentially exacerbating existing economic disparities”.

The BRICS leaders also used their declaration to denounce the recent military strikes on one of the bloc’s member nations, Iran.

“We condemn the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran since 13 June 2025, which constitute a violation of international law,” they wrote, adding that “peaceful nuclear facilities” had been targeted.

Israel carried out the first attacks against Iran in the 12-day war on June 13, and on June 22, the US sent seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to Iran to strike three nuclear facilities. Both Israel and the US have maintained these actions were necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, though Iran has denied seeking one.

In the wake of Trump’s tariff threat, BRICS leaders rushed to assure their US counterparts that they are not seeking confrontation. Others, however, chafed at Trump’s remarks.

“I became aware of what President Trump tweeted, and I think there needs to be greater appreciation of the emergence of various centres of power in the world,” said South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. “And this should be seen in a positive light, rather than in a negative light.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took an even blunter approach to Trump’s threats.

“I don’t think it’s very responsible or serious for the president of a country as big as the United States to go around threatening the world through the internet,” Lula said in a question-and-answer session with reporters.

“It’s not right. The world has changed. We don’t want an emperor.”

Leaders expected to decry US President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs while presenting the bloc as a defender of multilateralism.

Leaders of the growing BRICS group are gathering in Brazil for a summit overshadowed by United States President Donald Trump’s new tariff policies while presenting the bloc as a defender of multilateralism.

The leaders, mainly from the developing world, will be discussing ways to increase cooperation amid what they say are serious concerns over Western dominance at their two-day summit that begins in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.

The BRICS acronym is derived from the initial letters of the founding member countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The bloc, which held its first summit in 2009, later added Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as full members. It also has 10 strategic partner countries, a category created last year, that includes Belarus, Cuba and Vietnam.

But for the first time since taking power in 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping will not be attending in person, instead sending Prime Minister Li Qiang.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will also miss in-person attendance as he is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Brazil, as a signatory to the Rome Statute, would be required to enforce the arrest warrant.

The notable absences are raising questions over the group’s cohesion and global clout.

Now chaired by Brazil, leaders at the BRICS summit are expected to decry the Trump administration’s “indiscriminate” trade tariffs, saying they are illegal and risk hurting the global economy. Global health policies, artificial intelligence and climate change will also be on the agenda.

The BRICS countries say they represent almost half of the world’s population, 36 percent of global land area, and a quarter of the global economic output. The bloc sees itself as a forum for cooperation between countries of the Global South and a counterweight to the Group of Seven (G7), comprised of leading Western economic powers.

However, behind the scenes, divisions are evident. According to a source quoted by The Associated Press news agency, some member states are calling for a firmer stance on Israel’s war in Gaza and its recent strikes on Iran. The source requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will be attending the Rio summit.

But Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from Rio, said the group’s aim remains clear.

“The BRICS goal is to exert pressure for a multipolar world with inclusive global governance to give a meaningful voice to the Global South, especially in the trading system,” she said.

“It’s not super organised, nor does it have a radical global impact,” Newman added. “The real question is, can an expanded BRICS whose members have very different political systems and priorities form a sufficiently unified bloc to have any significant impact?”