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Showing posts from October, 2019

ADSL on its last legs in South Africa

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  By   Daniel Puchert Partially state-owned telecommunications company Telkom announced in its financial results for the year ending 31 March 2025 that its ADSL subscribers had more than halved to under 30,000. According to the company’s operational data, ADSL lines decreased from 64,959 in March 2024 to 29,770. This 54.2% decline highlights that the legacy broadband technology is slowly approaching the end of the road. Telkom’s ADSL business peaked at the end of March 2016 with 1.01 million subscribers — two years after fibre upstart Vumatel  broke ground in Parkhurst . What followed was a sharp decline in Telkom ADSL subscribers. Customers connected to its copper networks decreased by more than 500,000 over the next four years. This was partly driven by Telkom itself, which began actively switching off its copper network in some neighbourhoods. If it did not have fibre in the area, it would offer a “fixed line lookalike” wireless service that ran over its cellular ...
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South Africa: No Warm Welcome From Home Affairs At Beit Bridge

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We cannot have a Home Affairs department that is corrupt,’ declared President Cyril Ramaphosa in early October – while Barbara Dale-Jones was experiencing exactly that while travelling to Zimbabwe. As Ramaphosa visited the department’s head office in Pretoria, engaging staff and senior management on strategies to speed up visas and make it easier for visitors to enter the country, hundreds of Zimbabweans and South Africans experienced only frustration, corruption and prejudice at the hands of Home Affairs officials. Earlier this month, I travelled through the Beit Bridge border post from South Africa to Zimbabwe. The exercise took five hours in heat of more than 45 degrees Celsius. It was a horror and one that gave me a lot of time to reflect on what I was seeing. At first, the behaviour of the South African Home Affairs officials seemed like incompetence and laziness. They did not seem to have a properly functioning system in place. By the time I had crossed the bridge int...
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It's Woodward not Solskjaer who needs to be fired

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PREMIER LEAGUE  /  13 OCTOBER 2019, 4:00PM  /  OLIVER HOLT Ed Woodward is being blamed for Manchester United's decline. Photo: Jason Cairnduff/Reuters Under the aegis of the Glazer family, Manchester United have become a giant, suppurating mess of a football club. Blinded by the pursuit of cash, the club fleeces its fans and rakes in record revenues even as the team flails. The idea Old Trafford remains a Theatre of Dreams has become a joke. For some time, it has played host to a pageant of the mediocre and the dire. As United flounder in mid-table and approach the latest staging post in their fall from grace with the visit of reborn Liverpool next Sunday, speculation continues to grow about the future of manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and his replacement if he is fired. You’ve heard the names: Julian Nagelsmann, Massimiliano Allegri and Mauricio Pochettino have all been mentioned as candidates. It is said that if United lose to Jurgen Klo...
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There are days when 'my husband and I don't eat at all' - Families survive on one meal in drought-hit Zimbabwe

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2019-10-05 17:04 (File, Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) Multimedia    ·    User Galleries    ·    News in Pictures Send us your pictures   ·   Send us your stories Related Links Zimbabwe's leader begs for patience to fix ailing economy Zim ban on mobile money challenged in court Zim president: Our economy is dead In eastern Zimbabwe's parched Buhera district, Omega Kufakunesu's family has been forced to scale down daily meals to just a portion of vegetables and sadza, a thick maize-meal porridge. In the morning only the children get the porridge, and everyone skips lunch. "During the day we have wild fruit collected by the children, and at night we have smaller portions of sadza with vegetables," harvested from the communal village garden, said Kufakunesu, sitting outside her thatched round hut. A palmful of shumha, a drought-resistant wild fruit, is all she will eat during the day u...
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If everyone on Earth sat in the ocean at once, how much would sea level rise?

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  There are a lot of people, but the oceans are very big.   Rosley Majid/EyeEm via Getty Images If everyone on Earth sat in the ocean at once, how much would sea level rise? March 29, 2021 2.07pm SAST Author Tony E. Wong Assistant Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology Disclosure statement Tony E. Wong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Partners Rochester Institute of Technology  provides funding as a member of The Conversation US. The Conversation is funded by the National Research Foundation, eight universities, including the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Rhodes University, Stellenbosch University and the Universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal, Pretoria, and South Africa. It is hosted by the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Wester...
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Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...
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Which countries have the world’s largest coal reserves?

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  Visual Capitalist Elements   | September 15, 2021 | 8:58 am   Intelligence   Australia   USA   Coal   The Countries With the Largest Coal Reserves Cheap and abundant coal remains one of the largest sources of energy worldwide, even as governments set out goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While jurisdictions in Europe and North America have been phasing out coal use in power generation, it has been on the rise in Asia. China and India are scrambling to provide electricity to a growing population and relying on coal power plants to meet demands despite the environmental costs. SIGN UP FOR THE ENERGY DIGEST Sign Up This infographic takes a look into the  BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2021 , and the 11 countries that make up  89%  of the coal reserves globally. Coal Reserves, by Country While countries need to phase out coal by 2040 to achieve the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, consumption in key ...
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