Jacob Zuma, South Africa's leader for nine years, is an emblem of rogue leadership in an increasingly bankrupt country. If he succeeds in escaping imprisonment, a nation that was once a beacon of hope will fall further into ruin. South Africa is rushing like an out-of-control ox-wagon down the by-now familiar path of many post-colonial African countries into the heart of darkness.

South Africa's highest court last week ordered the imprisonment of the country's former president Jacob Zuma for 15 months for contempt of court. The decision stems from Zuma's refusal to appear at a commission to answer questions about his alleged involvement in corruption during his time as president between 2009 and 2018.

On Saturday, however, the constitutional court agreed to hear Zuma's urgent appeal on July 12 to rescind its order to sentence him to jail. If the court is gelded, the human rights so dearly won defeating apartheid will be lost.

Zuma, the former head of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), claimed that to jail him was akin to detention without trial, and that South Africa was sliding back to apartheid-type rule. Furthermore, he said that imprisoning him at the age of 79 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic amounted to a death sentence.

Thousands of his supporters traveled at the weekend to Zuma's home village of Nkandla in Kwa-Zulu Natal, to form a human shield to prevent him from being arrested "under any circumstances."

A hashtag on Twitter, #AllRoadsToNkandla, bristled with defiant statements.

Zulus wearing traditional garb and carrying shields and knobkerries toyi toyi-ed and sang 'struggle' songs.

But not all are in support. Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the traditional prime minister of the Zulu nation, said the regiments of Zulu warriors were acting in defiance of orders, and the royal household also distanced itself from the mob.

The fate of the very nation rests on the eventual result of this standoff. Constitutionalism is being challenged because it is incompatible with gangsterism.

The rule of law is being challenged as it is the number one enemy of those, like Zuma and his other corrupt ANC cronies, who have looted and robbed the country during their time in power. And hid both their crimes and their stupefying ineptness to rule behind the ANC's obsession with race and racism.

The ANC is now undergoing an internal battle for power... just as every gang is highly susceptible to internal struggles for more access and control of "turf" and "action" and, of course, the lucrative proceeds.

MP Pierre Poilievre (PC-Carleton) released a video Saturday where he announced that Bill C-10, the controversial bill that would have regulated Canadians' content online, has failed to pass through the Senate before summer break. He announced:

"We did it! We won a battle for freedom of expression! Remember Bill C-10, the censorship bill that would allow governments to control what you see and say online? Well, the Senate closed its doors for the summer without passing that bill."

"In other words, it is not the law today, and if Trudeau calls that early election he's been warning about, then the bill will die. Even if he wins that election, he'd have to re-introduce the bill from the very first stage and start all over again."

Everywhere in the media and in the halls of power, we hear that Israel has a right to self-defense. But when it comes to the question of whether Palestinians suffering under brutal occupation have the right to defend themselves, those same voices are conspicuously silent.

In a statement issued Monday, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price condemned "in the strongest terms" the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. Urging "de-escalation on all sides," Price then delivered the standard recognition of "Israel's legitimate right to defend itself and to defend its people and its territory." When the Washington bureau chief for Al-Quds daily asked whether Palestinians shared in the right to self-defense, Price's response was equivocal, affirming that "the concept of self-defense," should apply "to any state." To the stateless Palestinians, one can then conclude, the State Department extends no such rights.

This is a double standard shared by much of the corporate media, as well as among politicians, across Western democracies. A search of the media aggregator Factiva finds that the five US newspapers with the highest circulation — the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times — have run 343 articles this century containing the phrases "Israel's right to self-defense," "Israel has a right to defend itself," or "Israel's right to defend itself."

The first entry in our new series looks at how the World Health Organization removed natural immunity from their definition of "herd immunity".

Ever since the beginning of the "pandemic", and its transition into the clear "New Normal" (or "Great Reset) agenda, the English language itself has become a battleground. Words and phrases are being stretched and twisted into new, bizarre or contradictory meanings, or weighted with implications that never existed before.

"New Normal Newspeak" is our attempt to catalogue these changes, and stop the real meaning of words being memory-holed forever.

Our first example is a very, very literal one.

The phrase "Herd Immunity" has existed for decades, and most of us had probably come across it at some point prior to March 2020. It had a clear meaning, which was available from (among other places) the World Health Organization website:

Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.

As demonstrations against the Palestinian Authority president grow, security forces are resorting to ruthless tactics to prop him up, including beating and killing dissenters, and stealing explicit photos of female protesters.

"I saw with my own eyes how [the security forces] were using explicit photos, from the girls' phones they stole, as blackmail," a Palestinian journalist tells me, speaking anonymously, hoping to expose a scandal. If true, it adds to the long list of damning accusations which seem to be leading inexorably to the downfall of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Former Housing and Urban Development Department Secretary Dr. Ben Carson on Sunday blasted Critical Race Theory, calling it a "bunch of garbage."

Carson told Newsmax TV's Wake Up America that Critical Race Theory was "an attempt to use race as a mechanism for redefining our society." He warned the teaching could divide the American people and thus destroy the country from within.

Recent laws introduced in Hungary regulating marriage and gender identity risk discriminating against LGBT people and should have been put to citizens for public consultation before they were passed, Europe's top rights watchdog said Tuesday.

Among other things, the changes to the Hungarian Constitution in December 2020 altered the definition of families to exclude transgender and other LGBT individuals, defining the basis of the family as "marriage and the parent-child relationship." It declared that "the mother is a woman and the father is a man."


The Venice Commission - an advisory group on constitutional matters to the 47-country Council of Europe human rights body - said the Hungarian "Omnibus Act" could limit adoptions to heterosexual parents.

A shadowy unit of British troops has reportedly been providing on-site training and support to Saudi forces in Yemen, bringing fresh scrutiny to the official UK stance of not being "party" to the ongoing conflict in the country.

For months, some 30 soldiers have been stationed at the coalition-occupied Al-Ghaydah airport in the restive eastern province of Mahra, according to news outlet Declassified UK. A number of human-rights groups have alleged torture of detainees at a prison located in the airport.

"The tasks assigned to them so far are military training and logistical support, either for Saudi forces or Saudi-backed militia that are elements from the Southern Transitional Council (a Yemeni secessionist group)," said Hameed Zaabnoot, a tribal leader who has organised ongoing mass sit-in protests against Saudi presence in Mahra.

Sweden's caretaker prime minister, Stefan Lofven, said that he had secured enough support to form a new government and avoid snap elections, bringing some respite from the political turbulence that has rocked the Nordic region's largest economy in recent weeks.

Lofven, the leader of Sweden's Social Democrats, will seek to make his comeback in what is expected to be a knife-edge parliamentary vote on Wednesday.

"I was voted out a couple of weeks ago and the parties that were behind that have not been able to come up with a viable alternative," Lofven, 63, said at a press conference in Stockholm on Monday. "The country needs a government that has the ability to act."

Boris Johnson is to announce that the lifting of most remaining Covid-19 restrictions in England will go ahead on 19 July amid a backlash from government scientific advisers who have warned that doing so would be like building new "variant factories".


Despite cases having risen to their highest level since January 2021, the prime minister is set to press ahead with the final stage of unlocking in two weeks.

In a Downing Street press conference on Monday afternoon, he is expected to announce that, with 86% of adults in the UK having had at least a first jab, the government will move from relying on legal curbs to control people's behaviour to letting individuals make their own decisions.