Customers in South Africa can now use their bitcoin to purchase regular daily goods at a local food retailer.
Pick n Pay, one of South Africa’s largest retailers, has started rolling out Bitcoin payments in its stores, extending a pilot that began with 10 locations five months ago to a total of 39, local news outlet Sunday Times reported. The retailer said it plans to enable the payment option on all of its stores in coming months.
In addition to supporting on-chain Bitcoin transactions, Pick n Pay’s BTC-enabled payment gateway also allows customers to pay with Lightning wallets, a move that turns even the smallest of payments feasible. With its usage broadly showcased in the adoption of bitcoin by El Salvador last year, Lightning reduces transaction costs to a minimum while ensuring nearly instantaneous settlements. Customers can use the Bitcoin or Lightning wallet of their choice.
“The transaction is as easy and secure as swiping a debit or credit card. Customers scan a QR code from the app and accept the rand conversion rate on their smartphone at the time of the transaction,” Pick n Pay said, per the report.
Pick n Pay added that it will charge a small service fee for payments in BTC, “costing the customer on average 70c” of the local currency, per the report, which currently translates to about $0.04.
“Increasingly cryptocurrency is being used by those under-served by traditional banking systems, or by those wanting to pay and exchange money in a cheaper and really convenient way. Many companies are responding to this by accepting Bitcoin,” Pick n Pay said in a statement, according to a Reuters report.
Pick n Pay has almost 2,000 stores across the country, Business Insider South Africa reported. The firm has a 16% market share of the country’s formal food and grocery sector, per the report.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Peace talks between warring sides on Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict have been extended into this week, while the country’s prime minister complained in comments broadcast Monday about “lots of intervention from left and right” in the process.
An official familiar with the arrangements for the talks confirmed that discussions continued in South Africa between Ethiopia’s federal government and representatives from the northern Tigray region. The first formal peace talks began last week.
The African Union-led talks seek a cessation of hostilities in a war that the United States asserts has killed up to hundreds of thousands of people, an estimate made by some academics and health workers.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, speaking to the China Global Television Network, said “we’re working towards peace” and asserted that Ethiopians can solve matters by themselves. “Of course, if there are lots of intervention from left and right, it’s very difficult,” he added. He also said Ethiopian forces were in control of the Tigray towns of Shire, Axum and Adwa.
Neighboring Eritrea, whose forces are fighting alongside Ethiopian ones, is not a party to the peace talks, and it is not clear whether the deeply repressive country will respect any agreement reached. Witnesses have told the AP that Eritreans were killing civilians even after the talks began.
The fighting, which resumed in August after a monthslong lull, has been marked by guerrilla-style warfare by Tigray forces and drone strikes by Ethiopian ones that witnesses have said have killed civilians.
According to analysis of satellite imagery taken by Planet Labs PBC of Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar airport south of the Tigray region on Oct. 21, by armaments expert Wim Zwijnenburg of the Dutch peace organization PAX and by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the wingspan, length, shape and other identifying details of two smaller aircraft visible are consistent with those of the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drone.
The United Nations-backed International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia has found evidence of the government using drones in the conflict “in an arbitrary and indiscriminate manner,” commission members told journalists last week.
The commissioners said they have not done a comprehensive analysis of where Ethiopia is obtaining the drones, but they said they had confirmed the drone used in a strike that killed people in a displacement camp early this year came from Turkey.
The commissioners also warned that “atrocity crimes are imminent” if there is no cessation of hostilities in a conflict with abuses documented on all sides.
TORONTO, ONTARIO – SEPTEMBER 09: (L-R) Sheila Atim, Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, and John Boyega attend … [+] “The Woman King” Photo Call on September 09, 2022 in Toronto, Ontario. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
Getty Images
The person selected to be the makeup and prosthetic artist for Sony Pictures’ The Woman King had a wide-ranging job ahead of them. Not only did they have to match prosthetics and makeup to several different skin tones amongst the many shades of brown represented in the African Diasporic actors who starred in the film, but they had to color match each woman as she tanned several shades over the course of filming. Plus the artist had to research and build culturally-specific body scars and tattoos while also building a rapport with a cadre of actors, each with her own skincare wants and needs.
Babalwa Mtshiselwa and Thuso Mbedu prep for a scene in The Woman King.
Sony Pictures
This seems deceptively simple, but Hollywood is not well known for giving the top job to artists who are experts at all skin tones. Enter Babalwa Mtshiselwa, an award-winning makeup artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. For her, selecting the proper makeup for a variety of brown skin on film was not a challenge but a gift. Mtshiselwa was handpicked by director Gina Prince-Bythewood to to highlight the ladies and gents – not hide them.
“So what I’m gonna do is this: every time you get a shade darker, I’m gonna go shade darker with the foundation,” explained Mtshiselwa, as she recalled the conversations she had with the film’s numerous actors, including leading lady Thuso Mbedu, 007’s Lashana Lynch and four time Grammy-winning singer-turned-actor Angelique Kidjo. “So whatever you do, if you’re gonna be in the sun, I’m going to match that. So that’s exactly what we did.”
No one had to worry about their makeup being several shades lighter than their natural hue — a mindset that is very affirming on a movie set starring women who in decades past have had to bring this own hair and makeup to set because the person hired had no experience with black actors. This peace of mind made for luminous skin and an ease on set when actors knew their natural beauty was embraced, said Mtshiselwa.
The Woman King, an historical epic about the warrior women of the Kingdom of Dahomey, has since made around $80-million at the worldwide box office since its early September release. Audiences have hooped and hollered about the bold story of the ascension of General Nanisca, portrayed by Viola Davis, who ruled a country alongside a man who was not her husband. They also reveled in how each character looked when illuminated by lovely lighting that embraced the depth of brown skin instead of muting their colors and, of course, dialogue about the story of the Agojie warriors has taken over dinner tables and Facebook groups everywhere.
This true story of the women warriors of Dahomey (now present-day Benin) is not often taught in schools. Mtshiselwa said she first heard about them – and their turn against the intra-African-slave trade – when she saw the Variety story announcing the film would be made in South Africa. After learning more about the Agojie role in government and politics of the 18th and 19th century Dahomey, she was hooked and said she had to get a job on the film.
“I saw a post on Deadline on Instagram and said ‘oh my gosh, I have to be a part of that project,’” says Mtshiselwa, who resolved to use her network to gain an audience with Prince-Bythewood’s team. After showing her CV and her work – including makeup and hair for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to Knuckle City, Resident Evil, Netflix’s NFLX How to Ruin Christmas, Sly Stallone’s Judge Dread and the History channel’s 2016 mini series remake of Roots – she was hired.
Starring Davis, John Boyega, Lynch and Mbedu, the star-studded Woman King guaranteed packed theaters and an unlocking of imaginations surrounding what a true story set in Africa could be. The film, with a budget of just $50 million, was widely embraced by many but did bring about some hand-wringing from those who thought it would be solely about the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, would be apologistic in its approach to slavery or would be primitive in concept. It turned out to be far more than that.
Mtshiselwa, for her part, used good old-fashioned libraries and books (also on the internet) for her research into stylings for facial scars and other bits of realism added in as the women fought battle after battle or trained for battle.
“I read lots of different articles from as old as I could find them, from West Africa, you know Nigeria, Benin, generally west Africa, their culture and traditions. The cool thing about The Woman King is that yes, they were based there in the story but the kingdom was made up o people who weren’t from there. “
Her research happened to coincide with the French government’s decision to return 26 artifacts they stole from Benin, so Mtshiselwa was able to easily study actual art from the time period in question.
“It helped me a lot,” she says. “Cause I mean, for me, if it’s a face, anything that’s carved on that face means it’s either makeup or jewelry of some sort of scarification. So I took that and I just interpreted it in my own way. But it was also quite a sensitive thing because Sony didn’t really want to do too much copying of exact things, for the purpose of just trying to avoid any copyright issues.”
The set was a celebration of excellence she says, and should open doors for more makeup artists – like her – who have decades of experiences under their belt and the chops to do big budget, international films. She also hopes that the success of this film provides more opportunities for storytellers to showcase the wide variety of legendary tales that come from the continent and that more children get to see themselves in such a powerful tale.
With the help of Davis and her husband Julius Tennon (who co-produced the film as part of their firm JuVee Productions), Mtshiselwa rented out a theatre in Johannesburg so that girls aged 12 to 18 could see the movie.
“It’s part of an initiative called a Shero Like Me,” explained Mtshiselwa. “And this is all about being young, black and female and watching the screen and being in love with movies, but never seeing anyone being represented as powerful or strong the way that I always believed we are as black people on a screen. The most amazing part of it is that [the Agojie] are based on real people that really existed and that did protect their country for 300 years.
She goes on.
“Everyone was really excited about the film. Everyone was so moved by this film. Like, I would see people walking out of the cinema, just jumping around and excited and that’s just a beautiful energy. So I think it was a really, very special piece for black women here more than anyone else.”
The Woman King is still showing at theatres and is also streaming on Vudu via Roku.
Winter is coming. Again. For the past two years, colder temperatures have brought seasonal COVID upticks, which turned into massive waves when ill-timed new variants emerged. In Western Europe, the first part of that story certainly seems to be playing out again. Cases and hospitalizations started going up last month. No new variant has become dominant yet, but experts are monitoring a pair of potentially troubling viral offshoots called BQ.1 and XBB. “We have the seasonal rise that’s in motion already,” says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland. If one of these new variants comes in on top of that, Europe could end up with yet another double whammy.
The U.S. may not be far behind. America’s COVID numbers are falling when aggregated across the country, but this isn’t true in every region. The decline is largely driven by trends in California, says Samuel Scarpino, the vice president of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Initiative. In chillier New England, hospitalization numbers have already ticked up by as much as nearly 30 percent, and more virus is showing up in wastewater, too.
There are a couple of reasons to be more optimistic about this winter compared with last. The U.S. is just exiting a long and high COVID plateau, which means there is a lot of immunity in the population that could blunt the virus’s spread. An estimated 80 percent of Americans have had Omicron in the past year. And BQ.1 and XBB are not overtaking previous versions as quickly as Omicron did last winter. They seem unlikely to cause a winter surge as overwhelming for hospitals as the original Omicron wave, though a full picture of their severity and ability to reinfect is still emerging. (Both of these new variants are descended from Omicron: BQ.1 comes from BA.5, and XBB comes from two different BA.2 lineages that recombined into one. Confused by all these letters and numbers? Here’s a guide to understanding lineage names.)
Lab data tell us that both subvariants are capable of substantial immune evasion. XBB is already driving a surge in Singapore. BQ.1, and its closely related descendant BQ.1.1, are rising in Western European countries and now account for about 8 to 10 percent of cases, according to Hodcroft—but they are probably not widespread enough to explain why COVID rates were already going up. Several countries in the region may have already hit a peak for now, but as BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 become more prevalent, they could jump-start another wave.
The variant situation this winter could look different from past ones. Unlike previous winters, when Alpha and Omicron took clear paths to domination, now “there is this soup of variants,” says Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. One of these might come to monopolize infections in certain parts of the world, another elsewhere. BQ.1 and XBB are distinct enough from each other, Peacock says, that they could end up co-circulating, or not. It’s too early to say for sure. We could also get another unwelcome surprise, he adds—just as Omicron upended our winter expectations last Thanksgiving.
With a few more weeks of data, the real-world severity and reinfection rate of BQ.1 and XBB will be clearer. Still, our window into COVID reality is foggier than ever. As governments have ramped down COVID mitigations, they’ve also ramped down surveillance. “The data going into these models is far poorer because we aren’t sequencing as much,” Peacock says. In the U.S., the data we do have suggest that BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 account for about 10 percent of cases. Case numbers are also less reliable because of the rise of at-home testing, which generally doesn’t get officially reported.
Comparing across regions is becoming harder too. Back in March 2020, every country started with virtually the same amount of immunity against COVID: none. Since then, we’ve all been diverging immunologically from one another. South Africa, for example, had a large Beta wave that didn’t hit Europe. Europe saw a large and distinct BA.2 wave that never materialized in the U.S. And now countries are administering a mix of BA.1 and BA.5 bivalent boosters, depending on availability, and offering boosters to different segments of their populations. As we’re already seeing in the U.S., even different parts of the same country are likely to experience this COVID winter differently. “What’s happening in Boston is not what’s happening in L.A.,” Scarpino says. For communities to respond to the situation on the ground, “we have to have more real-time, locally relevant information.”
Job applications have soared at companies taking part in the trial for a four-day work week.
Westend61 via Getty Images
Trying to attract and retain workers? Forget pizza parties and nap pods. Companies in the U.K. are looking at a more promising solution: the four-day work week.
“Visits to our recruitment page have gone up by 60% and enquiries to the company have gone up by 534%,” Helen Brittain, human resources director at environmental consultancy Tyler Grange, told CNBC’s Make It.
The company is among those taking part in the U.K.’s trial for a four-day work week. Since implementing a shorter working week, the firm has noticed a huge difference when it comes to recruitment and retainment of employees.
“The interest that people are showing in the company is amazing,” Brittain said.
Tyler Grange isn’t the only company that has noticed a difference. Gaming-focused communications consultancy The Story Mob is another one, according to its founder and co-CEO Anna Rozwandowicz.
“We have definitely seen an increase in interest from job seekers,” she said, adding that shortly after shifting to the four-day work week, the team was able to fill a position that had been vacant for a long time.
Britain’s four-day work week trial is the largest of its kind so far, and has had widely positive reactions from employees and companies taking part. The idea behind it is simple: Workers aim for the same levels of productivity and output in 20% less time, for 100% of their pay.
The 4 Day Week Global campaign has also started a trial in Australia and New Zealand and is planning to expand in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa throughout 2022 and 2023.
For education technology firm Bedrock Learning, making recruitment and retention easier was a key driver for shifting to a four-day work week.
“Being brutally honest, it is a retention and recruitment piece,” its CEO and founder Aaron Leary told CNBC’s Make It. “It has been very much an employee’s market through the pandemic and there’s been a lot of movement, a lot of changing and Bedrock was also sort of susceptible to that,” he added.
Our retention of staff went up from 80% to 98%.
Mark Haslam
Managing Director, Loud Mouth Media
Like many other companies, Bedrock Learning struggled with the Great Resignation and the shift to flexible working, which made maintaining a company culture more difficult while making it easier to switch jobs. In early 2022, job vacancies also hit an all-time high in the U.K., according to the country’s Office for National Statistics, increasing competition for workers and therefore making recruitment harder.
Marketing agency Loud Mouth Media, also part of the four-day work week trial, was also affected. “That’s why we got involved,” said Managing Director Mark Haslam.
“During Covid our guys were just getting tapped up, left, right and centre,” he says, adding that competition for talent also intensified as companies started adding new perks for employees.
The shift to the four-day work week has been game changing for both companies.
“I would say things have completely sort of stabilised compared to what they were in terms of like retention,” Bedrock Learning’s Leary said, adding that only one employee has resigned since June, when the trial began.
According to companies trialing a four-day work week that CNBC Make It spoke to, employee recruitment has improved. However, the surge in applications doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to find the right candidate, said one managing director.
Westend61 via Getty Images
Over at Loud Mouth Media, Haslam also noticed major changes in both recruitment and retention.
“I would say our applications have doubled. We get a lot more ad hoc applications,” he said. “Our retention of staff went up from 80% to 98%.”
However, the surge in applications doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to find the right candidate, Haslam said.
“If somebody comes to me and says I want to work for you because you do a four-day week, we don’t entertain them remotely. Because it’s not a genuine driver for somebody and that just means somebody wants to work less, you know, it makes you kind of question their ethics,” he says.
Haslam said he wants to hire candidates who are aligned with the company’s values and goals, and that goes beyond the four-day week.
Tyler Grange has had similar experiences.
“We get an awful lot of people apply because we’re a four-day week trial company and not because they’ve got the right skill that we would actually be looking for in our business,” said Human Resources Director Brittain.
The firm’s managing director Simon Ursell agrees. “There aren’t that many applicants that are applying specifically for the roles we want,” he said. Even with the four-day work week, it remains difficult to fill some roles and find suitable candidates as the job market remains tough, he added.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Diplomats are calling on Ethiopia ’s federal authorities and their rivals in the northern region of Tigray to agree to a cease-fire as heavy fighting raises growing humanitarian fears.
African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat expressed “grave concern” in a statement Sunday over the fighting and called for an “immediate, unconditional cease-fire and the resumption of humanitarian services.”
AU-led peace talks were due to take place in South Africa earlier this month, but were postponed because of logistical and technical issues.
The warring parties had said they were ready to participate in the process, even though fighting persists in Tigray.
“The Chairperson urges the Parties to recommit to dialogue as per their agreement to direct talks to be convened in South Africa by a high-level team led by the AU High Representative for the Horn of Africa, and supported by the international community,” Mahamat said in a statement.
The AU statement followed one issued late Saturday by a U.N. spokesman who said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “gravely concerned about the escalation of the fighting” and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.
Fighting resumed between the Tigray forces and the federal troops in August, bringing an end to a cease-fire in place since March that had allowed much-needed aid to enter the region. Fighting has drawn in forces from Eritrea, on the side of Ethiopia’s federal military.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power called on Eritrean forces to withdraw from Tigray and urged the parties to observe a cease-fire, warning in a tweet that up to a 1 million people are “teetering on the edge of famine” in the region.
“The conflict has displaced millions of people, and camps for displaced Ethiopians have also fallen under attack,” said Power, who warned of further bloodshed if Eritrean and Ethiopian federal forces take charge of the camps.
The cease-fire calls came as heavy clashes were reported near the northwestern Tigray town of Shire, where an attack on Friday killed a International Rescue Committee worker who was distributing aid supplies.
European Union foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell said he was “horrified by the reports of continuous violence, including the targeting of civilians in Shire.”
Tigray forces said in a statement that they welcomed the AU’s cease-fire call.
“We are ready to abide by an immediate cessation of hostilities,” the statement said. Ethiopia’s federal government has yet to respond.
Aid distributions are being hampered by a lack of fuel and an ongoing communications blackout in Tigray. The Associated Press reported Saturday that a U.N. team found there were “10 starvation-related deaths” at seven camps for internally displaced people in northwestern Tigray, according to an internal document prepared by a humanitarian agency.
Millions of people in northern Ethiopia, including the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar, have been uprooted from their homes and tens of thousands of people are believed to have been killed since the conflict broke out in November 2020.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Diplomats are calling on Ethiopia ’s federal authorities and their rivals in the northern region of Tigray to agree to a cease-fire as heavy fighting raises growing humanitarian fears.
African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat expressed “grave concern” in a statement Sunday over the fighting and called for an “immediate, unconditional cease-fire and the resumption of humanitarian services.”
AU-led peace talks were due to take place in South Africa earlier this month, but were postponed because of logistical and technical issues.
The warring parties had said they were ready to participate in the process, even though fighting persists in Tigray.
“The Chairperson urges the Parties to recommit to dialogue as per their agreement to direct talks to be convened in South Africa by a high-level team led by the AU High Representative for the Horn of Africa, and supported by the international community,” Mahamat said in a statement.
The AU statement followed one issued late Saturday by a U.N. spokesman who said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “gravely concerned about the escalation of the fighting” and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.
Fighting resumed between the Tigray forces and the federal troops in August, bringing an end to a cease-fire in place since March that had allowed much-needed aid to enter the region. Fighting has drawn in forces from Eritrea, on the side of Ethiopia’s federal military.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power called on Eritrean forces to withdraw from Tigray and urged the parties to observe a cease-fire, warning in a tweet that up to a 1 million people are “teetering on the edge of famine” in the region.
“The conflict has displaced millions of people, and camps for displaced Ethiopians have also fallen under attack,” said Power, who warned of further bloodshed if Eritrean and Ethiopian federal forces take charge of the camps.
The cease-fire calls came as heavy clashes were reported near the northwestern Tigray town of Shire, where an attack on Friday killed a International Rescue Committee worker who was distributing aid supplies.
European Union foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell said he was “horrified by the reports of continuous violence, including the targeting of civilians in Shire.”
Tigray forces said in a statement that they welcomed the AU’s cease-fire call.
“We are ready to abide by an immediate cessation of hostilities,” the statement said. Ethiopia’s federal government has yet to respond.
Aid distributions are being hampered by a lack of fuel and an ongoing communications blackout in Tigray. The Associated Press reported Saturday that a U.N. team found there were “10 starvation-related deaths” at seven camps for internally displaced people in northwestern Tigray, according to an internal document prepared by a humanitarian agency.
Millions of people in northern Ethiopia, including the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar, have been uprooted from their homes and tens of thousands of people are believed to have been killed since the conflict broke out in November 2020.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (L) shakes hands with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang as he arrives for a meeting at … [+] the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing on January 9, 2019. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein / POOL / AFP)
AFP via Getty Images
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, suggested in an interview published on Friday that Taiwan become a special administrative zone of China, according to a report in The Guardian.
Musk told the Financial Times: “My recommendation … would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable, probably won’t make everyone happy. And it’s possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong,” the Guardian reported.
Tesla, though headquartered in the U.S., made about half of its cars last year in mainland China, the world’s largest auto market.
Chinese Communist Party-led Beijing claims sovereignty over democratic, self-governed Taiwan; the two sides have been divided since the end of a civil war in China in 1949.
Musk was born in South Africa and is currently a U.S. citizen. He has a fortune worth $219 billion on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List today.
The auto entrepreneur also waded into global politics recently by suggesting that the Ukraine cede the Crimea to Russia, drawing criticism from Ukraine.
JOHANNESBURG — South African police have launched a manhunt after a German tourist was shot and killed by gunmen near Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga province.
The attack on Monday was by gunmen who sped away without taking any belongings from the tourist or three other travelers who were with him.
The driver of the vehicle carrying the tourists was shot after he locked the vehicle’s doors when the gunmen demanded he open them, according to Mpumalanga police as reported by the News24 website on Tuesday.
The survivors are now receiving support from the German embassy.
“Concerning the tragic incident involving the death of a German tourist in Mpumalanga, the embassy is in close contact with the South African authorities. Our consular team is providing consular assistance,” the embassy said in a statement.
Mpumalanga province attracts many international tourists annually and is home to the Kruger National Park, South Africa’s largest game reserve.
South Africa’s tourism minister Lindiwe Sisuslu on Tuesday condemned the attack.
“I also call on law enforcement agencies to leave no stone unturned in bringing to book the perpetrators of this heinous crime,” said Sisulu.
She lamented that such crime hinders the country’s tourism industry.
“This high number of tourists is one of the ways in which our tourism sector has been able to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.
A 50,000 rand ($2,800) reward for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of those involved in the attack has been offered by the Kruger Lowveld Chamber of Business and Tourism.
First Lady Olena Zelenska says the Russians who invaded her country are engaged in terrorism; Evidence shows U.S. Forest Service mismanagement contributed to California wildfire; Siya Kolisi and South Africa’s rugby team.
You’d be hard pressed to find a sport where the captain matters more than it does in rugby. In these fierce, pitched matches, leadership is as critical as raw talent. What, after all, is a scrum, but a literal exercise in team bonding? Captaincy is more important still when your rugby team represents an entire country. So, when Siya Kolisi was named captain of the South African national team—the first Black player to hold that honor—it may as well have marked a political appointment. And Kolisi has responded with a singular approach, reconsidering a macho sport and recognizing how valuable rugby can be helping bind a country still riven by crime, corruption, and inequality.
You might think of rugby players as human bumper cars. Running forward, passing backward and obliterating everything in the way. This sport combines the collisions of football, minus pads, with the fluid continuity of basketball or hockey. It is, as the saying goes, a game for hooligans played by gentlemen.
Siya Kolisi: I always call it controlled violence, that’s what happens here.
Jon Wertheim: Controlled violence of–
Siya Kolisi: Yeah, and it–
Jon Wertheim: That’s rugby.
Siya Kolisi: And it’s legal violence. Yeah, and it’s legal. So we smash each other on the field and then it’s done after that.
Siya Kolisi
Mark Kolbe / Getty Images
Siya Kolisi is the first Black player to be named captain of South Africa’s national team—the Springboks—an international rugby powerhouse and national institution associated for more than a century with white Afrikaner rule and power. Today, in post-apartheid South Africa, Kolisi is keenly aware of the challenges of transforming the team.
Siya Kolisi: Well, we are human beings before we’re sportsmen, you know? And the more we talk to another, the more we understand each other, the more we get to know each other, and the more we trust each other and open up to each other, the more you get that deeper sense of connection with your teammate.
Jon Wertheim: You’re saying if—if–if I know your motivations, if I know your story, when we’re covered in mud and we’re at the end of game–
Siya Kolisi: You think of that. ‘Cause I don’t want to let you down. You know, when I’m– when we’re standing there and I’m tired, I don’t give up because I know that you won’t drop me, you know, and you know what I’m fighting for too.
We wanted to see this all for ourselves. But with Kolisi preoccupied with playing, we leaned on his friend and recently retired Springbok teammate. Tendai Mtawarira, AKA the Beast, accompanied us to an international match in Cape Town this past summer. He was our rugby guide as South Africa played Wales.
Jon Wertheim: They haven’t forgotten you. I’ll tell you that.
Tendai Mtawarira: No, they certainly haven’t.
Correspondent Jon Wertheim watches a match with Tendai Mtawarira
Lesson one: making your way to your seat with a rugby legend yields its own version of a scrum.
Lesson two: rugby demands a combination of speed, power, durability, and poise, and, of course, bone-rattling hits.
Jon Wertheim: Ooh.
Tendai Mtawarira: Now, he’s gonna be sore tomorrow. That’s for sure.
Jon Wertheim: Gonna feel that in the morning?
Tendai Mtawarira: Exactly.
Jon Wertheim: Another scrum? Man. I can only imagine what goes on in the bottom of a pile there.
Tendai Mtawarira: It’s a dark place.
Captain Kolisi featured prominently, making runs, driving forward.
Tendai Mtawarira: Oh, oh man. That was a good possession–
Jon Wertheim: A lot of possession, right?
In the second half of that game Kolisi scored a try, rugby’s equivalent of a touchdown.
A Black captain scoring in a stadium filled with South Africans of all colors. How things have changed.
Jon Wertheim: You grew up during apartheid. What role did rugby play in–in Afrikaner society?
Francois Pienaar: Massive. It was our holy grail. It was our opium.
Francois Pienaar
When Former Springbok captain Francois Pienaar played, black South Africans often cheered the opposing team. But when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994, in an effort to unite the country he threw his support—and moral force—behind the Springboks when they hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup. In a country where whites make up just 13 percent of the population, there was only one black player on the team.
The Springboks won the final match beating their rivals, New Zealand. The triumph was turned into the movie “Invictus,” Mandela played by Morgan Freeman, Pienaar by Matt Damon.
Jon Wertheim: This idea of using sport to repair a society.
Francois Pienaar: I don’t think it’s an idea. I don’t think it’s a tool. It just does that.
Jon Wertheim: It just is?
Francois Pienaar: It’s not something you– let’s– let’s use sport and we’re gonna unite people. It doesn’t happen that way. Then it’s false. It’s contrived. It’s made up. Sports are not made up.
Jon Wertheim: Unscripted—
Francois Pienaar: Unscripted.
Jon Wertheim: Unchoreographed—
Francois Pienaar: Guts. Guts. Guts. You know, and then it just comes together, and everybody’s there. Everybody’s a shareholder. When a nation’s team runs out, everybody’s a shareholder in that team. Everybody.
Siya Kolisi
Siya Kolisi was just four when South Africa won that 1995 World Cup. He grew up in the windswept streets of Zwide, a racially segregated area, a so-called township, outside the Indian Ocean city of Port Elizabeth.
Siya Kolisi: And this was my street I used to walk to the school.
Born to young, unmarried parents, he says he was lovingly raised by his grandmother. Money and food were scarce. Sometimes all he had before bed was a glass of water mixed with sugar.
Siya Kolisi: Welcome. This is where I grew up.
He and his grandmother lived in this home with cousins, uncles and aunts. Siya says he slept on the floor where rats ran over him.
Siya Kolisi: The only water source for the whole house.
Jon Wertheim: This is where you got your water, right here–
Siya Kolisi: Yeah. Yeah. Right here. And then this is the toilet. And it’s working now, but it didn’t work when I lived here.
Some of his earliest memories… his mother bruised and missing teeth at the hands of men. Both she and Siya’s grandmother died before he graduated from high school. But he says, it wasn’t an unhappy childhood. He made do with whatever he could.
Siya Kolisi: I didn’t have toys. I couldn’t afford toys. But I had to have fun. I had to enjoy myself. What did I do? I found a brick. That was my car. I loved that brick with everything that I-
Jon Wertheim: The brick was your car?
Siya Kolisi: Yeah. I used to wash it, I would park it, wake up in the morning. This is all that I had.
The field where Siya Kolisi first picked up a rugby ball
Around the same time, he came to this field, littered with stones and thorns and picked up his first rugby ball. It was a refuge from the violence, drugs and chaos beyond the stadium walls.
Siya Kolisi: This place– itself, if it wasn’t around, if there wasn’t a team, if there wasn’t a sport and the community of sport, I don’t know where I would’ve ended up. I was really happy. I enjoyed myself. It– it inspired me. And it taught me who I am.
Then came a major plot point. At age 12, playing on those pocked fields, he was spotted by a coach and offered a scholarship to the elite, mostly White, Grey Junior School, just 15 miles away.
Siya Kolisi: And, you know, just the building, you know? But looking at it. I mean, everything I need is here. Compared to what I’m used to-
He says that, for the very first time, he was given socks, a toothbrush, three meals a day and his own bed.
Jon Wertheim: That must have been such a culture shock to you.
Siya Kolisi: Yeah, it was. But the toughest thing was when I had to go home on weekends, I would go back and sleep on the floor. And I told myself right then and there, “I’m not letting this go. I’m– I will– this– I will not fail.”
He added a carapace of muscle, trained hard and by the time he graduated from school, was drafted to play professional rugby.
Rachel Smith, a fan of the sport, met Siya when she was 21.
Rachel Kolisi: Siya was young, and he was trying to figure out a lot, I think, in his life. I’ve met a lot of rugby players before, and I know what they get up to.
Jon Wertheim: What are they like?
Rachel Kolisi: They’re everything that you read and assume, it’s true.
Rachel and Siya Kolisi
Still, they started dating and soon the country’s racial divisions were laid bare. He was accused of selling out, she of, “contaminating her White bloodline.” They married and have two children. They also adopted two of Siya’s younger half-siblings. But Kolisi admits, he wasn’t immune to the trappings of celebrity.
Siya Kolisi: My head got big at times. I spent the money buying sports cars, drinking every weekend, spending the money with friends, you know? And just getting involved in– in– in– in– in things that I would never be proud of.
Siya Kolisi: But I wanna be better and I wanna learn. I go to therapy. And– and I get to talk to someone, you know?
Jon Wertheim: Can– can I stop you? You– you just very casually mentioned therapy. That– that is not something a lot of 31-year-old men, much less professional athletes would just drop in a conversation.
Siya Kolisi: ‘Cause it helps me heal. It helps me be better. If you’re sick maybe mentally or emotionally, therapy’s your medication. I wanna be the generation of Black men that are there for their children, you know? That are telling their woman that they love them, not only about words, by action too.
In 2018, with the Springboks mired in one of its worst-ever stretches, new coaches were appointed and Kolisi named captain.
Rachel Kolisi: He phoned me and he told me he’d been named this captain. And I was just like, “What? What? What?” And eventu– I couldn’t speak, so I ended up hanging up on him.
Jon Wertheim: And you were a rugby fan, you grasped the significance of this.
Rachel Kolisi: I mean, it was unbelievable, you know, just to see so many South Africans feel like they were finally being represented in this team.
Their team beginning to resemble the diversity of the country, the Springboks unexpectedly made the 2019 World Cup final held in Yokohama, Japan. The night before, the captain and wife discussed not the next day’s big match but what would accompany victory.
Siya Kolisi: We all want these big moments. It can be just a big moment. That’s it. Or you can use it for so much more. How can we use this opportunity not just– to help us but to help others around us, you know– you know, in our country?
Jon Wertheim: Biggest game of your career, night before the game, and you’re thinking about what you’re gonna do to enrich South Africa.
Siya Kolisi: This is why I’m here. That’s my purpose.
The Springboks won that World Cup resoundingly.
Jon Wertheim: You said that victory in Yokohama in 2019 meant more to South Africa than yours. Why?
Francois Pienaar: We had a Black World Cup-winning captain. In South Africa and the townships across the land, everybody, again, was proud. They were world champions, and that is what sport does. Nothing else can do that.
Fulfilling their promise to use the moment, Rachel and Siya started the Kolisi Foundation. We accompanied them on a visit to a shanty town outside Cape Town. This feeding program provides healthy meals for thousands of kids a day.
Siya Kolisi: I can’t give them food that I wouldn’t put in my mouth.
Kolisi says the abuse his mother faced has always haunted him. The scourge of gender based violence is one of the pillars of the foundation’s work. They hand out what they call “Power 2 You” packs: a whistle, pepper spray and emergency contacts.
Rachel Kolisi: We actually give it to young boys to give to women in their communities to tell them what it’s about.
Jon Wertheim: It’s intentional. You’re not just gonna give these out to the girls and the women. You’re gonna give these to the boys as well.
Rachel Kolisi: Yeah, absolutely.
For all Kolisi’s social ambitions, his sights are fixed firmly on defending the rugby world cup next year. Today, affection for him and the team remains at fever pitch. Remember that game we attended against Wales this past summer? Siya Kolisi’s try—his touchdown—held up as the decisive score, as South Africa won the series. The players were exuberant, if not a little bruised, and took a much-deserved victory lap. As for the fans—in suburbs, in townships, and in the stadium— they celebrated wildly. For those few hours on the pitch, the country’s troubles and divisions faded. As is often the case with rugby in South Africa, it was much more than a game.
Produced by Michael H. Gavshon. Associate producer, Nadim Roberts. Broadcast associate, Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Peter M. Berman.
Lesley Stahl speaks with “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah about growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, his career as a standup comedian, and Dave Chappelle’s controversial Netflix special.
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In post-apartheid South Africa, the national rugby team’s first Black captain, Siya Kolisi, is keenly aware of the challenges of transforming the team. Sunday, Jon Wertheim meets Kolisi & sees how he uses sport to help bind a country still riven by inequality & racial divisions.
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A few questions come to mind now that Steve Bannon is back in the news. After surrendering to New York authorities earlier this month to face charges of fraud and money laundering, will he be found guilty? How many shirts at once is one allowed to wear in prison? My own question, though, relates to a more tangential, nonlegal complaint concerning the former Donald Trump adviser.
Bannon has long viewed the honey badger, the unlikely star of a 2011 viral video, as his personal political emblem. Before his stint as a White House strategist, Bannon made the famous phrase “Honey badger don’t give a shit” the motto of his media operation Breitbart News;he even had it engraved on flasks as party favors.“I am not going to back down,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast after being arrested in 2020 on suspicion of defrauding donors for a dubious fundraising initiative to build a border wall. “I was called ‘honey badger’ for many years. You know, ‘Honey badger doesn’t give.’”
What did an obscure member of the badger family ever do to deserve this association?
The origin story is harmless enough. “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” was posted to YouTube in January 2011 and has been viewed more than 100 million times. I was 17 when the video came out, and I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen. In the three-minute clip, a slinky, industrious badger trots around the African savanna while the video’s narrator, Christopher Gordon, comments glibly on its behavior: “Ew, it eats snakes? Oh my God, watch it dig.”The most memorable line in the video is also the one that has come to define it: “Honey badger don’t care,” Gordon says, while the creature swats at a snake. For my birthday that summer, I was given a Honey Badger Don’t Care T-shirt, which I later wore to one of my very first college parties, tucked into high-waisted black shorts.
The honey badger’s seemingly fearless, take-no-prisoners approach clearly caught Bannon’s eye. When Trump made a particularly vicious attack during a debate with Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election, Bannon quipped that it was “classic honey badger.” Allies in Bannon’s movement who, like him, see themselves as pugnacious disruptors of a staid political establishment have embraced the label. The symbolism, after all, is more brazenly intelligible than that of a donkey and an elephant. Mark Finchem, the bolo-tie-wearing, election-denying candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, goes by the handle @AZHoneyBadger on the right-wing social network Gab. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who showed up at a Trump rally this month to declare him the rightful president, held a raffle last year for a $2,900 honey-badger-branded AR-15–type firearm—“the same type of gun the hate-America gun-grabbers in DC would love to ban if they ever get the votes.”
No animal chooses to be a political mascot. And the honey badger is so much more than an internet meme or a totem of right-wing election deniers. This little mustelid is a smart, scrappy striver working its way through a hostile world with—above all—ingenuity. Please, this creature might say if he knew what was going on. Exclude me from this narrative.
Objectively, the honey badger is physically equipped to be a whirling dervish of trouble. It is omnivorous, with a long body for tunneling and strong forearms for digging. With its small, snarly mouth and sharp teeth, the honey badger is like an overgrown ferret crossed with a wolverine. The honey badger’s body is a sinuous defensive machine. As the animal’s name suggests, it is very fond of raiding bees’ nests in search of honey and juicy larvae, and its thick skin cannot easily be penetrated by bee stings—or even by porcupine quills. Plus, that skin is loose, which means that if a predator grabs it from behind, the honey badger can swing around and bite back.
The honey badger can be found traipsing about deserts and grasslands in Africa, India, and parts of the Middle East—which makes the creature a strange choice, as a non-native species, for the “America First” set. European badgers, which have striped faces and feature prominently in children’s literature, are social with one another but shy around humans. American badgers look similar to European ones but are slightly more ferocious, and smaller, sandy-colored badgers can be found throughout Asia. Appearance-wise, the honey badger has a more lithe and weasel-like body than the European or American badger. And instead of bold striations on their face, they’ve got a long, thick stripe from head to tail, as though they’ve been dipped horizontally in milky-white paint.
Honey badgers also have a high degree of immunity from the neurotoxins produced by some snakes. They’ve been known to fight and eat black mambas, among the world’s most venomous snakes, for a nighttime snack. In one well-known video, a honey badger is bitten by a puff adder, passes out, wakes up, and eats the snake. “That’s an extremely unique reaction” in the animal world, Danielle Drabeck, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “It’s pretty incredible that it’s doing that—and we don’t know anything about it!” Drabeck’s current research involves studying vertebrate adaptations such as venom resistance, which could prove useful in antivenom development.
Despite what the YouTube video suggests, none of these adaptations is due to the honey badger not caring. The animal is quite passionate about survival. Instead of playing dead like an opossum, the honey badger tackles challenges directly. When cornered, it will take on a leopard. “Mustelids punch above their weight; that’s something they’re known for,” Emily Latch, who studies badgers at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, told me. “They’re carnivorous in a way that perhaps comes as a surprise.”
Although they are brave and built for survival, “it’s not like they’re going out just to pick fights,” Liz Johnson, a senior wildlife-care specialist who works with honey badgers at the San Diego Zoo, told me. Johnson describes them as “a little mellower” than nature documentaries might make them out to be—even bashful. “It’s been hard for researchers to study them in the wild, because they do everything they can to avoid interaction with humans,” she said. Honey badgers are typically nocturnal, but in more remote parts of their territory, researchers have observed them going about their business during the daytime, Johnson said.
The main thing to know about the honey badger, though, is that they are incorrigibly curious. They like to inspect unfamiliar objects and will make off with items that interest them. Brian Jones has decades of experience with honey-badger mischief. He runs the Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, in South Africa’s Limpopo province, where he’s been rescuing honey badgers and other native animals for decades. In South Africa, honey badgers are considered pests, often breaking into farmers’ chicken coops and killing birds, and Jones is sometimes called in to trap and relocate them.
A few badgers live at Jones’s rehab center, including one 20-something male named Stoffel. When Stoffel first arrived at Moholoholo some years ago, he was allowed to roam free. But after one too many raids on the center’s pantry, Stoffel was placed in a wire-fence enclosure. Stoffel proved to be a formidable escapologist. Almost immediately, he burrowed underneath his pen and found himself in a cage full of bewildered lions. “He fought the lions!” Jones told me. “His skin is so loose, he’d swing in his skin and bite the lion on the face!”
After that, Jones built the badger a cement enclosure with high walls. Stoffel was undeterred: Again and again, he scrambled up and over the walls, using sticks, rocks, mud balls, and anything else he could find to build a makeshift ladder. Honey-badger cognition remains under-studied, according to the experts I interviewed, but stories like this add to the anecdotal evidence suggesting that honey badgers are capable of using tools to solve problems—an indicator of intelligence in animals.
Natalia Borrego, a biologist specializing in African mammals, has conducted a few pilot studies of honey-badger intelligence with some of the badger residents at Moholoholo, including Stoffel’s son Stompy. Not only did the badgers quickly solve every meat-filled puzzle box she put before them, but they also wanted to wrestle and receive belly rubs. Borrego hasn’t finished her experiments, but “honey badgers have all the hallmarks of an intelligent species,” she told me. “I wish there were more researchers investigating them.”
In my interviews, not a single expert said they would describe the honey badger as “mean”—or “nastyass,” per the 2011 video’s title. Instead, they spoke of these mustelids with awe, admiration, and something like delight—as though they were grinning on the other end of the phone while they described the badgers’ antics. Jones keeps a drawer full of chocolates in his desk. This fact has not gone unnoticed by Stoffel, who one day scrambled into Jones’s office, determined to have a taste. Because Stoffel couldn’t open the drawer with his claws, he quickly changed tactics, lying on his back under the desk, lifting his feet up, and kicking the drawer open from underneath. “They are a terror,” Jones admitted to me happily. “But I love them, I love them, I love them.”
Drabeck, the University of Minnesota biologist, sighed when I mentioned the honey badger’s unwitting political ties. “They’re just really cool animals,” she said.
Sometime in the spring of 2020, after centuries, perhaps millennia, of tumultuous coexistence with humans, influenza abruptly went dark. Around the globe, documented cases of the viral infection completely cratered as the world tried to counteract SARS-CoV-2. This time last year, American experts began to fret that the flu’s unprecedented sabbatical was too bizarre to last: Perhaps the group of viruses that cause the disease would be poised for an epic comeback, slamming us with “a little more punch” than usual, Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Tennessee, told me at the time.
But those fears did not not come to pass. Flu’s winter 2021 season in the Southern Hemisphere was once again eerily silent; in the north, cases sneaked up in December—only to peter out before a lackluster reprise in the spring.
Now, as the weather once again chills in this hemisphere and the winter holidays loom, experts are nervously looking ahead. After skipping two seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, flu spent 2022 hopping across the planet’s lower half with more fervor than it’s had since the COVID crisis began. And of the three years of the pandemic that have played out so far, this one is previewing the strongest signs yet of a rough flu season ahead.
It’s still very possible that the flu will fizzle into mildness for the third year in a row, making experts’ gloomier suspicions welcomingly wrong. Then again, this year is, virologically, nothing like the last. Australia recently wrapped an unusually early and “very significant” season with flu viruses, says Kanta Subbarao, the director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute. By sheer confirmed case counts, this season was one of the country’s worst in several years. In South Africa, “it’s been a very typical flu season” by pre-pandemic standards, which is still enough to be of note, according to Cheryl Cohen, a co-head of the country’s Centre for Respiratory Disease and Meningitis at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. After a long, long hiatus, Subbarao told me, flu in the Southern Hemisphere “is certainly back.”
That does not bode terribly well for those of us up north. The same viruses that seed outbreaks in the south tend to be the ones that sprout epidemics here as the seasons do their annual flip. “I take the south as an indicator,” says Seema Lakdawala, a flu-transmission expert at Emory University. And should flu return here, too, with a vengeance, it will collide with a population that hasn’t seen its likes in years, and is already trying to marshal responses to severaldangerous pathogens at once.
The worst-case scenario won’t necessarily pan out. What goes on below the equator is never a perfect predictor for what will occur above it: Even during peacetime, “we’re pretty bad in terms of predicting what a flu season is going to look like,” Webby, of St. Jude, told me. COVID, and the world’s responses to it, have put experts’ few forecasting tools further on the fritz. But the south’s experiences can still be telling. In South Africa and Australia, for instance, many COVID-mitigation measures, such as universal masking recommendations and post-travel quarantines, lifted as winter arrived, allowing a glut of respiratory viruses to percolate through the population. The flu flood also began after two essentially flu-less years—which is a good thing at face value, but also represents many months of missed opportunities to refresh people’s anti-flu defenses, leaving them more vulnerable at the season’s start.
Some of the same factors are working against those of us north of the equator, perhaps to an even greater degree. Here, too, the population is starting at a lower defensive baseline against flu—especially young children, many of whom have never tussled with the viruses. It’s “very, very likely” that kids may end up disproportionately hit, Webby said, as they appear to have been in Australia—though Subbarao notes that this trend may have been driven by more cautious behaviors among older populations, skewing illness younger.
Interest in inoculations has also dropped during the pandemic: After more than a year of calls for booster after booster, “people have a lot of fatigue,” says Helen Chu, a physician and flu expert at the University of Washington, and that exhaustion may be driving already low interest in flu shots even further down. (During good years, flu-shot uptake in the U.S. peaks around 50 percent.) And the few protections against viruses that were still in place last winter have now almost entirely vanished. In particular, schools—a fixture of flu transmission—have loosened up enormously since last year. There’s also just “much more flu around,” all over the global map, Webby said. With international travel back in full swing, the viruses will get that many more chances to hopscotch across borders and ignite an outbreak. And should such an epidemic emerge, with its health infrastructure already under strain from simultaneous outbreaks of COVID, monkeypox, and polio, America may not handle another addition well. “Overall,” Chu told me, “we are not well prepared.”
At the same time, though, countries around the world have taken such different approaches to COVID mitigation that the pandemic may have further uncoupled their flu-season fate. Australia’s experience with the flu, for instance, started, peaked, and ended early this year; the new arrival of more relaxed travel policies likely played a role in the outbreak’s beginning, before a mid-year BA.5 surge potentially hastened the sudden drop. It’s also very unclear whether the U.S. may be better or worse off because its last flu season was wimpy, weirdly shaped, and unusually late. South Africa saw an atypical summer bump in flu activity as well; those infections may have left behind a fresh dusting of immunity and blunted the severity of the following season, Cohen told me. But it’s always hard to tell. “I was quite strong in saying that I really believed that South Africa was going to have a severe season,” she said. “And it seems that I was wrong.” The long summer tail of the Northern Hemisphere’s most recent flu season could also exacerbate the intensity of the coming winter season, says John McCauley, the director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre at the Francis Crick Institute, in London. Kept going in their off-season, the viruses may have an easier vantage point from which to reemerge this winter.
COVID’s crush has shifted flu dynamics on the whole as well. The pandemic “squeezed out” a lot of diversity from the influenza-virus population, Webby told me; some lineages may have even entirely blipped out. But others could also still be stewing and mutating, potentially in animals or unmonitored pockets of the world. That these strains—which harbor especially large pandemic potential—could emerge into the general population is “my bigger concern,” Lakdawala, of Emory, told me. And although the particular strains of flu that are circulating most avidly seem reasonably well matched to this year’s vaccines, the dominant strains that attack the north could yet shift, says Florian Krammer, a flu virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Viruses also tend to wobble and hop when they return from long vacations; it may take a season or two before the flu finds its usual rhythm.
Another epic SARS-CoV-2 variant could also quash a would-be influenza peak. Flu cases rose at the end of 2021, and the dreaded “twindemic” loomed. But then, Omicron hit—and flu “basically disappeared for one and a half months,” Krammer told me, only tiptoeing back onto the scene after COVID cases dropped. Some experts suspect that the immune system may have played a role in this tag-team act: Although co-infections or sequential infections of SARS-CoV-2 and flu viruses are possible, the aggressive spread of a new coronavirus variant may have set people’s defenses on high alert, making it that much harder for another pathogen to gain a foothold.
No matter the odds we enter flu season with, human behavior can still alter winter’s course. One of the main reasons that flu viruses have been so absent the past few years is because mitigation measures have kept them at bay. “People understand transmission more than they ever did before,” Lakdawala told me. Subbarao thinks COVID wisdom is what helped keep Australian flu deaths down, despite the gargantuan swell in cases: Older people took note of the actions that thwarted the coronavirus and applied those same lessons to flu. Perhaps populations across the Northern Hemisphere will act in similar ways. “I would hope that we’ve actually learned how to deal with infectious disease more seriously,” McCauley told me.
But Webby isn’t sure that he’s optimistic. “People have had enough hearing about viruses in general,” he told me. Flu, unfortunately, does not feel similarly about us.
GAUTENG, South Africa, August 14, 2020 (Newswire.com)
– As soon as South Africa’s President Ramaphosa announced the National State of Disaster on March 15, the Scientology Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response team moved into action. They immediately began decontaminating COVID-19 hotspots and they have not slowed down since.
Beginning with essential services such as police and fire departments, they extended their help by forming partnerships, beginning with the Department of Social Development with whom they decontaminated over 900 buildings, including shelters and orphanages.
They extended their reach to clinics, hospitals, the Departments of Roads and Transport, Environmental Health, Arts and Culture and ultimately every municipality in Gauteng.
Mid-April, they took on daily disinfecting of entire fleets of taxis.
With more than 200 partnerships from Gauteng to KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and Eastern Cape, the Volunteers have provided decontamination to 19,000 buildings, 558,000 vehicles, and railway and bus stations. They have contributed some 350,000 volunteer hours to fighting the pandemic.
While they continue these services, a priority of the Volunteer Ministers is the empowerment of others. In that regard, they have handed out 1 million copies of educational booklets on preventing the spread of the virus in English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho.
They are also offering training to anyone wishing to join their ranks. Their 19 Tools for Life courses are all available free of charge through the Scientology and Volunteer Ministers websites.
Caroline, a volunteer who recently completed these courses, said, “The Scientology Tools for Life Courses made me a better person than before. Most of all, I can understand other people’s behavior and am more able to assist them through life’s challenges.”
The principal of a school said, “It is amazing to see how many leaders were produced through participation in this training and these leaders are changing the lives of others for the better.”
The officer of a South African Police Service (SAPS) station described the training as an “eye-opening experience for me personally.”
The Church of Scientology Volunteer Ministers program is a religious social service created in the mid-1970s by Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard. It constitutes one of the largest and most visible international independent relief forces.
A Volunteer Minister’s mandate is to be “a person who helps his fellow man on a volunteer basis by restoring purpose, truth and spiritual values to the lives of others.” Their creed: “A Volunteer Minister does not shut his eyes to the pain, evil and injustice of existence. Rather, he is trained to handle these things and help others achieve relief from them and new personal strength as well.”
The work of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers of South Africa since the country went under lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Press Release –
updated: Jul 16, 2020
GAUTENG, South Africa, July 16, 2020 (Newswire.com)
– South Africa released an overview of the work of Scientology Volunteer Ministers since March 23 when the country went under lockdown.
With winter approaching in the Southern Hemisphere, the Church of Scientology looked at the possible ramifications of the coronavirus on the country and mobilized hundreds of volunteers to tackle the pandemic and encourage others in their work against this common enemy.
“Since day one, our priority has always been to assist essential services,” says Gaetane Asselin, President of the Church of Scientology in South Africa. “Our target was those who keep the country going, those who are the most vulnerable and those hardest hit by the pandemic.”
The best way to convey what they have accomplished over the past three months is in the numbers, according to Asselin, beginning with their work to clean and sanitize key facilities and vehicles:
Over 10,000 buildings, including many government buildings and hundreds of homeless shelters, orphanages, and homes for the elderly
Nearly 300,000 taxis, ambulances, metro police cars, and fire trucks
Tens of thousands of buses, sanitized at night, so millions of commuters can travel to work safely each day.
The Church of Scientology saw to the printing of 1 million copies of three educational prevention booklets and had them translated into Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho. Volunteer Ministers from the church have distributed more than 600,000 copies of these booklets so far to help everyone understand and implement simple prevention principles to keep them safe and well.
“Hundreds of volunteers worked 15-hour days, seven days a week for the last 100 days to get this done,” says Asselin. “The work is tough, but we are thrilled to be able to assist this way. We know how much this is needed and that’s what keeps us going. Our team has contributed some 250,000 volunteer hours, all funded by the Church, to safeguard essential services and those most vulnerable in the country.”
One community leader in Ekurhuleni said, “Your dedication, motivation and perseverance leaves me speechless.”
A horse trainer burst into tears when the volunteers arranged to sanitize her facility for free. “Nobody does this kind of thing these days,” she said. “This is exceptional.”
A court manager from Koster Magistrate Court thanked the volunteers for their “tireless effort in a time when we most needed help.”
“We have all been trained on the Volunteer Ministers technology developed by Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard,” says Asselin. “It is this technology that helps us keep going in these difficult times. It gives us the certainty that no matter the challenges, something can be done about it.”
“The Way to Happiness”—in support of the new era South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa envisions
Press Release –
updated: Jun 5, 2019
PRETORIA, South Africa, June 5, 2019 (Newswire.com)
– At his inauguration on May 25, South Africa President Cyril Rampaphosa vowed to tackle corruption and rejuvenate the country’s struggling economy. To help him accomplish his goals and ensure a peaceful celebration, volunteers and police officers handed out more than 60,000 copies of The Way to Happiness to those flooding into Pretoria to be part of the historic occasion.
Elected in May, Mr. Ramaphosa initially took over the position in 2018 when former President Jacob Zuma resigned amid accusations of corruption. Ramaphosa’s campaign was based on a platform of honest government and social reform.
“It is time for us to make the future we yearn for,” he told the more than 30,000 gathered at Pretoria’s Loftus Versfeld Stadium. “It is through our actions now that we will determine our destiny.”
Well aware that his election was “a mandate to build a nation founded on social justice,” Ramaphosa stressed the importance of “dealing with each other with honor, dignity and respect.”
These are ideals echoed in the pages of The Way to Happiness, a common-sense guide to better living written by author and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard, and forwarded by the distribution of the booklets to those attending the inauguration.
Volunteers began arriving the evening before the event and worked through the night and the following day, handing out copies of The Way to Happiness to ensure a peaceful inauguration ceremony.
Morality, honesty, taking charge of one’s own future—these are all strengthened by the application of the 21 precepts of this guide to better living. And they are vital components for building an ethical and productive society.
The Way to Happinesswas written in 1981. Immensely popular since its first publication, some 115 million copies have been distributed in 115 languages in 186 nations. It holds the Guinness World Record as the single most-translated nonreligious book and fills the moral vacuum in an increasingly materialistic society.
The Church of Scientology and its members are proud to share the tools for happier living contained in The Way to Happiness.
ST. HELIER, Jersey, October 11, 2018 (Newswire.com)
– Latitude Consultancy, a leading firm in the investment migration industry, continues its ambitious and strategic growth with three new representatives that will further expand its global footprint.
Ms. Luciana Fernandez will be representing Latitude in Brazil, with an office located in the country’s largest city and financial hub, São Paulo. Ms. Fernandez previously worked with Latitude’s institutional partner, JTC Trust Group, and has a deep understanding of the Latin America market. The Portugal Golden Visa Programme – one of Europe’s most attractive residence-by-investment options – is very popular with Brazilian clients and will be a key offering for the office. Ms. Fernandez and her team will be hosting a launch event and an Investment Migration Seminar in São Paulo on November 13.
With the addition of Luciana, Sandra and Marc to our team, we can better serve our clients in South America, Africa, and the Middle East and in the process pursue our ambitious growth strategy. We now look to 2019 for further expansion into Asia.
David Regueiro, Chief Operating Officer
The second Latitude representative is Ms. Sandra Woest who is located in Cape Town, South Africa and brings over five years of experience in the industry. Ms. Woest has worked closely with South African families looking to relocate or develop a sound and safe secondary residence plan. She will also be hosting a series of Investment Migration Seminars in Q1 of 2019 across South Africa.
Finally, Latitude is also proud to announce the addition of Mr. Marc Menard who brings with him a wealth of experience assisting high-net-worth individuals and families from the Middle East with their migration plans. Mr. Menard is based in Lebanon and will be working with Latitude’s Dubai office to further cement their presence in the region.
Latitude’s CEO and founding partner, Mr. Eric Major, on the expansion into these three markets, “We are excited to be expanding our global footprint to help meet the growing demand for our specialized services in these key markets. The three individuals are very talented, knowledgeable and share the same set of values that Latitude embraces and instills within the company culture”.
Mr. David Regueiro, COO of Latitude, adds “With the addition of Luciana, Sandra, and Marc to our team, we can better serve our clients in South America, Africa, and the Middle East and in the process pursue our ambitious growth strategy. We now look to 2019 for further expansion into Asia”.
About Latitude:
A new generation of wealthy elite have ambitions that reach far beyond the limitations of national borders. They live in a connected world, with a global outlook. Latitude’s team of specialists offer leading insight and expertise to investors who are prepared to make an important economic contribution to gain residency or citizenship privileges in a selected country. Latitude also provides government advisory services by helping nations create residency and citizenship-by-investment programmes that attract this privileged segment of the world population to their shores. Our internationally recognized team have over 75 years of combined experienced in the Investment Migration industry. An unrivaled international network of clients and institutional relationships, combined with complementary ancillary services from our global financial services partner, provides a uniquely compelling proposition for our clients. However, what makes us really stand out from the crowd is our approach: genuinely innovative products, competitively priced services, and customer-driven, hands-on delivery. Our clients expect the world – we deliver it. Welcome to your world. www.latitudeworld.com
