South Africa - Page 5

The City of Cape Town, whose residents are frustrated with repeated the electricity failures of the national utility, Eskom, has invited bids from independent power providers to supply the city with 300 MW of electricity.

Dr. Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who was among the first to identify the omicron variant of the Wuhan coronavirus, told the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday she was subjected to “a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians” to portray omicron as more dangerous than it actually was.

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Wednesday demanded “wealthy countries” pay them $16 billion in cash up front to drive coronavirus schemes in developing countries, including mass vaccination rollouts.

Former South African Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng was asked Friday by a judicial panel to apologize for remarks he made in 2020 supporting the State of Israel.

The power went out Saturday night as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed a gala fundraising dinner for his ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), causing embarrassment to the government and forcing his evacuation.

South Africa’s government recently erected four separate checkpoints along its border with Zimbabwe in an effort to detect and arrest “hundreds of undocumented Zimbabweans” who have crossed into South Africa illegally in recent days, the online newspaper New Zimbabwe reported on Tuesday.

South African officials are scapegoating a poor, unemployed black man for the fire that broke out in Parliament on Sunday and was only extinguished on Tuesday, according to the man’s lawyer.

A huge fire that destroyed a large part of South Africa’s parliament has been brought under control, firefighters said on Monday.

The Parliament of South Africa caught fire early Sunday morning in Cape Town and burned for several hours, damaging both houses of the national legislature, with no cause yet determined, according to local news reports.

South African public health officials announced on Thursday that they believe the surge in Chinese coronavirus cases fueled by the omicron variant in the country is ending, leaving a record of lower hospitalizations and severe cases than previous waves.

Upon assuming the presidency, Joe Biden promised the world, “America is back,” building on his campaign claims that President Donald Trump had severely damaged relations with the country’s allies.

In a report documenting major reactions to the recent passing of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Reuters international news agency gave a prominent position to a senior Hamas figure as well as an official of the terrorist-designated Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) alongside world leaders and prominent figures including President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Pope Francis, and the Dalai Lama.

Tutu’s lasting legacy to South Africa and the world is the principle that oppressed people should equally obey principles of justice and human rights in their struggle. It was a principle he was to abandon in his later support for the Palestinians against Israel.

Thousands of South Africans celebrated Christmas in Johannesburg and Cape Town this week despite a recent surge in omicron cases.

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Fox News Medical Contributor and Clinical Professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine Dr. Marc Siegel predicted that coronavirus cases will decline in January and the U.S. will follow

Coronavirus patients are “80 percent less likely to be hospitalized if they catch the omicron variant, compared with other strains,” Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing a study by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) released on Tuesday.

Scientists are suggesting the omicron variant may be milder than previous strains of coronavirus, according to a string of preliminary reports released Thursday in the UK and South Africa.

African doctors and health officials on Tuesday denounced the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for recommending Pfizer and Moderna vaccines above Johnson & Johnson, after it reported the J&J vaccine carries a small risk of causing blood clots.

A WHO update on the Chinese coronavirus published this weekend cited South African case data and suggested that the rate of hospitalization for omicron may be 25% lower than for delta.

VIENNA (AP) – Germany is tightening travel restrictions for people coming from Britain in response to the rapid spread of the omicron variant there.

“Eleven times fewer” Chinese coronavirus patients — or just 1.7 percent — were hospitalized for symptoms as part of South Africa’s latest wave of the Omicron variant compared to the 19 percent of coronavirus patients admitted to hospitals during South Africa’s equivalent summer wave of the Delta strain, South Africa’s Health Ministry told reporters on Friday, as reported by the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa tested positive for an undisclosed strain of the Chinese coronavirus on Sunday and was presenting “mild symptoms” of illness as of Monday, Reuters reported.

President Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” on Thursday and Friday was a spectacular disaster, an embarrassment to the free world at precisely the moment when democracy needed to demonstrate bold confidence – and basic competence – against the rising tide of authoritarianism. 

The South African government is being urged to apologize to Miss South Africa Lalela Mswane after she finished in the top three of the Miss Universe competition in Israel on Sunday night — after her own country withdrew its support for her efforts because she would not boycott the Jewish state.

South Africa, the most important democratic country on the African continent, is boycotting President Joe Biden’s two-day “democracy summit,” after the Biden administration slapped a hasty travel ban on the country due to the omicron variant.

Miss South Africa Lalela Mswane “may single-handedly have dismantled” the anti-Zionist BDS campaign by competing in Israel, Joel Pollak said.

The Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines, Teodoro Locsin, Jr., denounced on Tuesday the “breathtaking stupidity” of travel bans imposed on African countries following the discovery of the Omicron variant of Chinese coronavirus in late November.

South African Dr. Angelique Coetzee — who discovered a new variant of “Covid-19,” or the Chinese coronavirus, called Omicron last month in her patients — told the Africa News Agency (ANA) on Tuesday she considered the worldwide bans on travel out of southern Africa following Omicron’s emergence “knee-jerk” and short-sighted, given the lack of information about the strain.

Jerusalem’s deputy mayor hailed the South African Miss Universe hopeful, Lalela Mswane, for her bravery in defying the South African government’s call for her to boycott the annual pageant over its location in Israel.

An editorial in the government-owned newspaper Ghanaian Times published Monday accused President Joe Biden and other Western leaders of “mak[ing] Africa their whipping boy” by banning African travelers from entering their countries in response to the discovery of the “Omicron” variant of Chinese coronavirus.

State and federal officials are refusing to reveal where the first U.S. patient to have been identified with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus traveled en route to California from South Africa, where it is suggested that he or she contracted the virus.

If character is one of the criteria for judging Miss Universe, then Lalela Mswane has earned the crown — and she deserves to bring it back to South Africa, defying the haters once more. Where she has led, more will surely follow.

The presidents of Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire joined South African President Cyril Ramaphosa for engagements on Wednesday and Thursday in solidarity following the imposition of a travel ban on that country by President Joe Biden and leaders of European and Middle Eastern states this week.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday denounced President Joe Biden’s ban on travel from southern Africa, and similar measures hastily imposed by other nations after the Omicron coronavirus outbreak, as “travel apartheid” – in other words, racist mistreatment of Africans.

The first confirmed U.S. case of the omicron coronavirus variant has been found in a fully vaccinated traveler who returned to California after a trip to South Africa, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced Wednesday afternoon in the White House briefing room that the first confirmed case of the “Omicron variant” of COVID-19 had been identified in California in an individual who recently returned from South Africa.