A carbon tax could be one policy instrument to tackle climate change, poverty and unemployment if it is designed and used correctly.

The commission's in loco inspection, set up to investigate the August shooting at Marikana, has revealed that the bodies of miners were not limited to a specific area as video footage led many to believe, but were in fact spread out over a vast area. On Monday, crime scene experts led the commission and those involved in the inquiry on an inspection of the area near Marikana where 44 people lost their lives. They were accompanied by a host of national and international media.

Anglo American will face a hearing next year to determine if it's liable for miners who contracted silicosis while working in its gold shafts. Anglo American no longer has gold assets in South Africa, but the proceedings, initiated by 18 plaintiffs, have been launched on the grounds that miners contracted the debilitating lung disease when the company still ran bullion mines.

South Africa’s judicial inquiry into the police’s killing of 34 striking mineworkers at Lonmin Plc’s Marikana mine begins on Monday with a visit to the site of the most deadly police action since the end of apartheid. Retired Supreme Court Judge Ian Farlam, assisted by two lawyers, is mandated to investigate events between August 9 and 16, Kevin Malunga, spokesman for the commission of inquiry, said in an interview on SAFM radio on Monday. Public hearings are being held in the northwest town of Rustenburg.

Former residents of the Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban are pursuing damages claims against the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, three years after the police failed to protect them from an armed gang that invaded the settlement in September 2009. This is an important case because it holds the police responsible to prevent violence perpetuated by others when it is in a position to do so, says this press release from the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa.

Fearing mass arrests and deportations, a group of about a hundred desperate undocumented asylum-seekers have turned to the South African Human Rights Commission to seek redress. New applicant asylum-seekers in the province have been languishing in the cold by the Department of Home Affairs former Refugee Reception Office at the Foreshore after it shut down the Maitland Refugee Reception Office and ordered these asylum-seekers to travel up to Pretoria or Musina for documentation. The department’s refusal to process new-comers is in defiance of two recent Western Cape High Court orders ordering it to resume documenting new applicants at their refugee offices on the Foreshore.

‘Racial quotas are hateful’. So says Sunday Times columnist Stephen Mulholland. I don’t agree. It is an undeniable truth that race and political affiliation rank above ability in the current dispensation. However, Mulholland cunningly equates Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Affirmative Action with Nazism and apartheid. It is devoid of any facts. Woolworths is driving a programme adhering to the country’s labour legislations. It is geared towards addressing the inherent socio-economic inequalities of the past. BEE is not a law that was designated for oppression. Rather, one for balancing the scale. Apartheid had its affirmative action for whites. This one is to redress such imbalances. It could lend itself to abuse by our political demagogues. In some instances it has degenerated to an STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) by some public representatives and the ruling party elites.

Comrade Umshini Wam infamously declared most recently to the DA speaker: ‘..you have more rights because you’re a majority. That’s how democracy works.’ The remark questioned his understanding of constitutional democracy. Again, attempting to bring in another notorious spokesperson in the form of Jimmy Manyi, Mulholland fraudulently attempts to equate the plight of the Coloured people to the economic hegemony of the Jews the world over. Since history has always been written by the victors, there has always been a conspicuous effort to erase Africa in the discourse on civilization. As if it is only the preserve of Europe. Therefore we also owe it to ourselves to change his/herstory to be ourstory.

In the post-1994 dispensation, it is easy for privileged Mulhollands to point fingers at our broken education system, festering hospitals, rape of the defence budget, corrupt tenders and so on, as they remember their formerly legalized racial superiority, despite having lost nothing under the democratically elected regime. It is worth reminding such people that none from the down-trodden South African approves of cronyism, corruption and other shortcomings of the government. The question that begs an answer should be how to review these legislations to benefit all of us equally. Racial quotas, according to his own definition, were not meant to perpetrate crimes against humanity or for genocidal purposes.

As seen in Palestinians at the hands of the Jewish settlers who arrived a couple of decades ago. In contrast, the indigenous South Africans demonstrated their humane side by not chasing Mulholland and such melamin neither challenged nor orchestrated any mass killings against them. This is despite them having colonized us for more than three centuries. Yet you have people like him having the audacity to judge our country against Hitler’s Nazi regime.

*MP Khwezi ka Ceza is a freelance journalist and an independent political economist

For much of this winter, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town have taken to the streets in some of the most active civil disobedience protests since 1994.

South Africa truck drivers and other transport workers launched a strike for higher wages Tuesday, a union spokesman said, amid concerns that the standstill could cause fuel shortages. Truckers were seeking a 12-percent increase for 2013 and 2014, but would not settle for less than nine.

Workers at several Anglo Platinum mines have decided to continue their strike, despite management threats to dismiss all those who didn't show up to work by Monday evening. The strikers, who hope to meet with management on Tuesday, are pushing for at least the 11-22 per cent raises that Lonmin miners at the nearby Marikana mine received after a deadly strike that left 46 dead.

Proposed changes to the Employment Equity Act will severely penalise companies that lag behind on transformation if they come into effect, including hefty fines for noncompliance. But companies still have a long way to go to achieve greater representation of black people, women and people with disabilities in the workplace. The Commission for Employment Equity released its 12th annual report this week, which shows that white men remain dominant in almost all top management levels in the workplace. They make up 65.4% of top management positions, six times the part of the economically active population they represent.

Pro-and anti-Malema factions have vowed to demonstrate outside court as the expelled ANC Youth League leader faces criminal charges. The Polokwane Regional Court looks set to become the stage for a media circus, as both supporters and opponents of expelled ANC Youth League president Julius Malema vowed to launch protests and counter-protests in the Limpopo town ahead of his court appearance this week.

Activists attending the public hearings on the controversial Traditional Courts Bill in Parliament were shocked when women were told debate and comment on the Bill were not welcome. A number of civil society organisations and rural women have travelled to participate in the public hearings on the Bill which has been widely criticised for entrenching gender inequality and possibly subjecting millions of rural South Africans to a ‘second class’ justice system. It is feared that the Bill, which is before Parliament’s Select Committee on Security and Constitutional Development, in its current form gives patriarchal traditional courts enormous power to undermine the Constitutional rights of women and children.

Rock drillers at Lonmin's Marikana mine have accepted a 22% overall pay increase to end more than five weeks of crippling and bloody strikes. This increases their salaries to just over R11 000. Other workers will get a 2% increase on top of the 9% increase agreed upon earlier this year.

For the first time in more than 10 years, Cosatu goes to its national congress – starting on Monday at Gallagher Estate in Midrand – with the prospect of having the positions of two of its most senior officials – president Sdumo Dlamini and general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi – contested. Vavi's opponents say he acts as if above everyone else in Cosatu, and have taken issue with his public criticism of leaders of the ANC, government and the alliance. They want him to be replaced by KwaZulu-Natal provincial secretary Zet Luzipho.

South Africa’s beleaguered government continues its security crackdown in Marikana, with the South African National Defence Force announcing that it deployed 1,000 soldiers to the restive mining town in the North West. 'It seems as if both government and Lonmin misread the situation on the platinum belt, and now what seemed resolvable might become an untenable situation,' Bishop Jo Seoka, president of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) said in a statement released by the Bench Marks Foundation. And as South Africans react with alarm to the scale of the security presence in Marikana, Sekoa believes the government’s most recent attempts to assert control over the striking workers threatens the gains made in negotiations.

The community located near the Lonmin-owned platinum mine which has been the scene of a bitter strike, wages a daily battle with air and noise pollution, intense crime and appalling living conditions. With no access to sanitation and garbage removal, the surrounding plateau is strewn with rotting rubbish. Nearby streams are polluted by sewage as thousands live out realities far from the billion-dollar industry they clock their cards into each morning.

Cosatu wants to review its strike processes to ensure workers are happy with the outcomes, and that associated violence and intimidation are reduced. 'It is worrying...that only half of the Cosatu members surveyed in the 2012 Workers’ Survey were satisfied with the outcome of the strikes in their workplace,' the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) said. 'Public sector Cosatu members were more satisfied than their private sector counterparts,' according to Cosatu's organisational report prepared for discussion at its national congress.

In this briefing, the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) deal with the Pioneer/Pannar seed merger, outlining the evidence led by the ACB in opposing the merger, what is at stake for South Africa if the merger is approved and the extent to which the merger will deepen structural imbalances in the South African economy.

A first for South Africa was a gathering that brought together passionately techno-affluent computer geeks, media personnel and civic society with a craving for open-data systems. Held at Ndifuna Ukwazi’s office in Cape Town over the weekend, the event code-named 'Hackathon' started with a brief introduction to some of the initiative’s key objectives and what the Open Data and Democracy Initiative was about. Comprising a group of young people pushing for a more open democracy, the initiative is made up of ordinary citizen activists, technologists, journalists and entrepreneurs aimed at developing and applying practical open technologies and promoting open data as a means for efficient governance, increased transparency, improved service delivery and empowerment of SA citizens.