As part of an ongoing series, The Guardian's David Smith visits Johannesburg's Ponte City, a skyscraper apartment tower with a history mirroring South Africa's.

The young middle class are moving back into Ponte 40 years after it first opened its doors amid a surge of optimism and wall-to-wall shag carpeting. Johannesburg, an economic engine and ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Renee Bonorchis and Palesa Vuyolwethu Tshandu report on the wave in protests in South Africa against statues of prominent colonial-era figures, people whose work led to apartheid. On the one hand, they are only symbols; on the other, well, they are symbols.

The statue of Paul Kruger, a president of the Afrikaner-led Transvaal Republic ( Read more... )

Janice Kew and Christopher Spillane, writing for Bloomberg, describe how Pizza Hut is trying to break into booming African markets.

Pizza Hut knows a few things about fast expansion in emerging markets. In less than 25 years, the chain has added more than 1,300 restaurants across China. But Randall Blackford, the general manager of Pizza Hut’s ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes a leaked E-mail from Target Canada suggesting that liquidation sales will begin Thursday the 4th.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper wondering if the unusually close orbit of Kepler-78b is a product of a stellar close encounter.
• The Dragon's Tales notes Russian interest in a BRICS space station.
• Joe. My. God. notes the worsening of Sao ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that Stollery's at Yonge and Bloor could be demolished soon.
• Centauri Dreams notes that gyrochronology--using a star's spin rate to calculate its age--works.
• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the spacing of planets in exosystems.
• The Dragon's Tales notes that dogs crossed into the Americas only ten thousand years ago.
• Joe. My. God. notes how ( Read more... )

I've a post up noting how people immigrate to Africa these days.

The Dragon's Tales linked to Adam Minter's Bloomberg View article describing how China is starting to outsource as it becomes rich.

In November, Hebei Iron & Steel Co Ltd, a provincial-owned company and China’s largest steelmaker by production, announced that it was moving 5 million tons of its annual production -- roughly 11 percent of the 45 ( Read more... )

Al Jazeera's Sam Cowie describes how, despite strong economic growth, Mozambique is still short of jobs. Personal anecdotes and statistics combine to produce an argument suggesting that potential instability is quite possible here.

A 2012 report by the Open Society Foundation estimated that 70 percent of people under age 35 in Mozambique - who ( Read more... )

Livejournal's robby pointed me to the New Scientist article suggesting that HIV is becoming less virulent over time in many populations.

To track how HIV has been evolving, Philip Goulder of the University of Oxford and his colleagues compared HIV samples taken from 842 pregnant women in Botswana and South Africa. In Botswana, the epidemic took ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Amogelang Mbatha describes one sign of the increasing wealth of black South Africans: shopping centres in their urban townships.

The Maponya Mall is a five-minute drive from one of the starting points of the June 16, 1976, riots in which police killed at least 200 people. It epitomizes the increasing gentrification of townships, with ( Read more... )