There is a certain irony in a party that pioneered all-women shortlists back in 1993 still not having managed, more than three decades later, to put a woman in charge of it. Andy Burnham is about to become Britain’s prime minister without ever having had to beat a female rival
Jakarta played host this week to a meeting that could reshape how people and cargo move between Southeast Asia and the Gulf. Indonesia’s Transportation Minister, Dudy Purwagandhi, sat down with his Saudi counterpart, Saleh bin Nasser Al-Jasser, Minister of Transport and Logistics Services, on Monday, and the two walked away
Egypt’s engineering sector has quietly become one of the country’s export success stories, and now officials want to turn that momentum into something much bigger. The government’s target: push engineering exports from roughly $6.5 billion in 2025 to $13 billion by 2030, effectively doubling the sector’s footprint on global markets
A crisis, not a prejudice There is a meaningful distinction between opposing illegal immigration and opposing Africans. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address to the nation drew that line explicitly, insisting South Africans are not, by disposition, xenophobic, while acknowledging that undocumented migration places real pressure on the labour market and public
South Africa’s upstream oil and gas sector rarely intersects with its foreign policy. That changed this month, when environmental justice organisation The Green Connection wrote an open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa questioning the optics of an Israeli firm becoming operator of a major offshore exploration block, precisely as Pretoria
Chery Automobile’s formal takeover of Nissan’s Rosslyn plant on 3 July 2026 is more than a change of factory ownership. It marks the moment a Chinese automaker converts import-driven market share into permanent industrial presence on South African soil , and it crystallises a broader restructuring of who builds cars
If you wanted a single week to illustrate how disconnected headline geopolitics has become from the oil market’s underlying direction, this was it. On Tuesday, tankers came under attack in the Strait of Hormuz. By Wednesday, the US had struck multiple Iranian targets and revoked its earlier authorization of Iranian
Walk onto almost any groundbreaking site in American manufacturing right now and you’ll find the same contradiction: investment dollars flowing in at a pace not seen in years, even as the underlying cost of doing business keeps rising. This week alone brought fresh evidence of both halves of that story,
NATO leaders left Ankara this week having pledged more money, more missiles, and more unity than at almost any summit in years. On paper, that’s a win for the alliance. Look closer, though, and the Ankara summit didn’t showcase NATO’s strength so much as expose its limits, and for the
South Africa’s fiscal referee has finally blown the whistle. On 7 July 2026, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana confirmed that National Treasury is temporarily withholding the July equitable share transfer, the largest unconditional grant local government receives, from Johannesburg and roughly 70 other municipalities. Reports place the exact count between 69