DA Parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko’s new 35-member shadow cabinet includes many DA MPs who opposed her election to the party’s top parliamentary post.

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Barack Obama has used his state of the union address to launch his 2012 re-election campaign, with a populist speech portraying himself as the champion of working-class America against the small, wealthy elite he claimed is protected by the Republicans.

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A DA Student Organisation campaign poster showing two people of different races in a provocative position caused a stir on social networks on Monday.

The poster shows a white man embracing a black woman with the tagline: “DASO In our future you wouldn’t look twice.”

The organisation got a flood of responses on its Facebook page with many complaining about its implied nudity.

Read more here (via News24)

MBEKI GEARING UP TO RETAKE POSITION?

- By Max du Preez (via The Mercury)

Come back, Thabo, all is forgiven (well, almost all).

There cannot be a more telling indictment of the leadership of President Jacob Zuma than the sudden excitement at the possibility of Thabo Mbeki making a comeback.

I must confess I feel excited about the prospect too and, yes, I am mildly embarrassed to have to admit this.One of the wisest and most admirable things our former president had done in his long career was to stay out of public politics since he was unceremoniously fired as president in September 2008.

It must have been hard. The man has a strong sense of his own intellectual prowess and a known disdain for that of his successor.

Read the full opinion here.

Julius Malema’s appeal case begins this week, prompting analysts and political commentators to seriously question the political future of the beleaguered former ANCYL leader.

According to Jon Herskovitz of Reuters Africa, if the panel made up of senior ANC officials upholds the previous sentence, Malema, 30, would be stripped of his position as president of the ANC Youth League and ostracised by the party the dominates politics in Africa’s largest economy.

While Malema and five other league leaders prepare for the January 23^rd appeal date – their lawyers filed heads of argument today - Times Live reported that internal politics have forced a divide within the party as members vie to succeed Malema as president.

Read more here.

The Atlantic – The author, who writes under a pseudonym, is a Japanese sushi chef. In 1982, at the invitation of a Japanese-North Korean trading company, he started working in a sushi restaurant in Pyongyang. In 1988 he agreed to serve as Kim Jong Il’s personal chef—a job he held until 2001. In April of that year, having realized the extent of the paranoid and oppressive surveillance he was under, he escaped to Japan. In 2003, in Japanese, he published Kim Jong Il’s Chef (Fuso Publishing, Inc.), from which these excerpts are drawn.  Read more here.

Times Live – Former COPE spokesman and MP Phillip Dexter has rejoined the ANC, he said on Tuesday. Dexter, who was a fierce critic of the ruling party during his time with the Congress of the People, said he broke the news to COPE leader Mosiua Lekota on Tuesday morning. Read more here.

Taxpayers will be coughing up about R250m for former councillors who were not re-elected in last year’s local government elections, News24 has said. 

Mbulelo Musi, spokesperson for the co-operative governance and traditional affairs department, said the money will be used to compensate former councillors who had served their full five-year terms for their “hard work under extremely difficult circumstances”.

Read the full story here.

“The Iowa caucuses, the curious political ritual that will open yet another race for the White House on Tuesday, have a knack for turning second-place finishes into victories,” Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times noted this week.

And they are just as likely to produce losers — or deal surprises — as they are to coronate a clear-cut winner. According to Zeleny and Rutenberg, the outcome of the Iowa caucuses will set the tone for the race after a yearlong prelude that has been off the charts in its unpredictability.

Read the full story here.

‘Romney would buy the election if he  could.’

- Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on fellow rival Mitt  Romney.

via Time

DA leader Helen Zille has become the target of much criticism after referring to musician Simphiwe Dana as a “professional black” in a heated racism debate on Twitter, Times Live has reported.

It all started when singer-model Lindiwe Suttle on Tuesday tweeted about the racism she has experienced in Cape Town. Other tweeters joined in the topic, which was tagged #CapeTownIsRacist. The tag became a trending topic on SA Twitter, with some agreeing and others rebuffing the accusation.

Read the full story here.

Free State African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) members were called up on Sunday for a solidarity gathering at the party’s Luthuli House headquarters in support of league president Julius Malema and others.

Read the rest of the article here. (via The Mail and Guardian)

President Jacob Zuma’s candidate for South Africa’s next chief justice is embroiled in a new scandal – this time about his endorsement of the death penalty.

The National Association of Democratic Lawyers (Nadel) has lashed out at Judge Mogoeng Mogoeng’s “active participation” in pushing in 1988 for a man whose original legal team didn’t represent him properly, to be executed.

Read the full story here (via News24)

Ministers, MPs, magistrates, the president, premiers, judges, and traditional leaders have been granted a humble 5% salary increase, almost making those public servants (6.8%) look greedy.

But then again, they get paid a bit more. There are even plans link the top dogs’ pay to performance in future, CARIEN DU PLESSIS reports.

Read the full story here (via The Daily Maverick)

Doyle MacManus – It’s possible that the president will get a boost in the polls if Moammar Kadafi is captured, but it’s not likely to help him much in 2012.

In recent decades, victories abroad haven’t mattered all that much in elections at home. So, while it’s possible that President Obama will get a bounce in the polls if Moammar Kadafi is captured and taken off in chains, it’s not likely to help him much in 2012.

Read the full story here (via LA Times)

The amount of white whining that ensued after Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s call for a wealth tax made me proud.

I was starting to worry that white people were finally falling behind black people in the great race to prove conclusively that the best way to deal with an uncomfortable truth is to entirely misunderstand the issues. Now I see that democracy has worked in our country. We are truly all equally stupid and greedy.

Read the full story here (via Mail & Guardian)

Several corruption probes, including that of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, has been stalled due to lack of funds, Public Protector Thuli Madonsela said according to a report on Sunday.

Madonsela confirmed members from her office met with the National Treasury to apply for R30m in emergency funding this week in order to cover salaries and operational expenses for more investigations, The Sunday Independent reported.

Read the full story here (via News24)

An Indian reform activist whose protest galvanized the nation’s anger against corruption ended his 12-day hunger strike Sunday after forcing Parliament to throw its weight behind his crusade.

Seventy-four-year-old Anna Hazare accepted a cup of coconut water and honey from two children as thousands of supporters cheered him on, waving Indian flags, chanting “long live India” and singing patriotic songs.

Read the full story here (via The Guardian)

There is an open revolt in the ruling party over this week’s Waterloo disciplinary hearing against ANC Youth League president Julius Malema.

City Press is in possession of audio material in which senior Limpopo ANC leaders aligned to Malema can be heard urging league members to revolt against the ANC leadership for bringing misconduct charges against him.

Read the full story here (via News24)

Western powers are determined to bring about regime change in Libya regardless of the cost to that country, former president Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.

In a speech to students at Stellenbosch University, delivered in his capacity as patron of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, he said the major Western powers had intervened in Libya to “advance their selfish interests”.

Read the full story here (via Times Live)