World renowned and revered South African photographer David Goldblatt has died at the age of 87. He became a photographer at the age of 18 and would come to focus his camera on quiet, yet equally poignant features of the brutal apartheid regime. He documented South Africa's troubled journey through the apartheid years to the present. Those of us who had the pleasure of meeting and working with David recall him as a true gentleman and a professional to his core. We shall miss him. Fellow photographer Paul Weinberg reviews his life and work.

SA has a long and sad history of land expropriation and then denying black South Africans the right to own land. When this prohibition was removed in 1991, government passed ULTRA - the Upgrading of Land Tenure Rights Act, which was supposed to hand title deeds to 5m South Africans. This never happened and remains one of the burning scars of the last two decades.

It is with an overwhelming sense of joy and relief that SA can say goodbye to Jacob Zuma. His rule, at the helm of our country, in the highest office in the land — which all citizens should respect — has been a mockery of democracy and our Constitution. There is no other way to greet his departure than to say: "Good riddance."

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at Toronto University, has become something of a rock star for his evangelical approach to common sense. He first gained notoriety when he refused to abide by the University's edict that transgender people should be addressed by pronouns of their choosing, such as ‘zhe’ and ‘zher’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’. He went on Channel 4 to debate the issue and delivered a master class in common sense, rendering the combative interviewer speechless at one point. It's worth saving for posterity, if only to show how crazy these cultural wars have become. The Left needs to wake up to some of the nonsense being propagated in their name.

As Michael Hudson and Charles Goodhart argue in this article, the Biblical concept of Jubliee debt cancellations had a stabilising effect on societies through the ages. In particular, it provided security of tenure over land for indebted farmers, which had beneficial impacts in generating future tax revenue for the rulers. Here, the authors aruge that debt cancellations could indeed be reintroduced today, albeit in a different format, to create a property-owning democracy, and to make it possible for students to attend higher level education without being crippled with debt upon graduation. Perhaps it is time to start a real discussion, backed by solid research, on the pros and cons of debt forgiveness.  

2017 will go down as the year the tide turned against corruption. President Zuma will soon be gone and his successor, assuming it is Cyril Ramaphosa, will start to rebuild the ruling party around traditional ANC Charter values of human rights and respect for voters. He will have to if the ANC has any hopes of maintaining a majority in the 2019 elections. 2017 was also a year in which the courts started to rein in lawless behaviour by the banks, making it harder to repossess homes for a pittance. 

The phrase "climate denier" has come to mean someone who refutes the facts of climate change brought about by humans. But as Scott Adams point out in this article, the climate science believers and deniers are actually talking about two different things. The subject has become so muddied by the word "science" that the term has lost its meaning. There may indeed be climate change - but don't expect science to solve this one.

Why does South Africa keep embracing destructive policies when there is no shortage of proof that these policies will fail and spread poverty? Could it be that this is intentional, or that ideologues refuse to apprehend the lessons of history? Perhaps it is a bit of both. In this article, Temba Nolutshungu argues that we should heed the lessons of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and China's Deng Xiaoping, all of whom espoused free markets and individual liberty.

International investor and author Doug Casey writes that the world is entering the Diamond Age, where nation states will disappear and groups of like-minded people will organise themselves into clans in pursuit of freedom and optimum survival. Far-fetched? Maybe. But the evidence of social atomisation is already visible all around us.

David Rockefeller Sr passed away earlier this month at the age of 101. In death, as in life, he remains the scourge of conspiracy theories the world over. He presided over the shadowy Council for Foreign Relations for decades and is widely assumed to be a key architect in the "deep state" government that survived more than a dozen presidents since World War 2. So who was this man, and what did he really stand for?

Veteran journalist Ed Herbst catalogues the instances of fake news coming out of the once venerable journal, The Cape Times, since Aneez Salie was appointed editor three years ago. This, of course, follows a pattern of journalistic outrages since Iqbal Surve acquired ownership of the newspaper. Take a look for yourself.

Individual liberty has been corroded by self-serving politicians, to the point where our rulers are emulating the apartheid social engineers who came before them. Medical students are required to enter the service of the state, businesses cannot chose whom they employ, and the unemployed are denied the right to enter into free association with employers at a mutually-agreed wage. This is what has become of the noble struggle for freedom that birthed this nation, writes Temba Nolutshungu of the Free Market Foundation.  

Everywhere news is screaming to us that things are bad and getting worse - from education standards to health, business and politics. While not everything is rosy, Free Market Foundation's executive dirtector Leon Louw points out some facts that suggest things are not as bad as they might seem.