Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on or ganized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining. What emerges through Loewenstein's re porting is a dark history of multinational corpo rations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world's most valu able commodity.

This meticulously researched book uses previously secret official documents to explore the tangled web of relationships between the top echelons of the British establishment, incl Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, police/military officers and intelligence services with loyalist paramilitaries of the UDA & UVF throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Covert British Army units, mass sectarian screening, propaganda 'dirty tricks,' arming sectarian killers and a point-blank refusal over the worst two decades of the conflict, to outlaw the largest loyalist killer gang in Northern Ireland. It shows how tactics such as curfew and internment were imposed on the nationalist population in Northern Ireland and how London misled the European Commission over internment's one-sided nature. It focuses particularly on the British Government's refusal to proscribe the UDA for two decades - probably the most serious abdication of the rule of law in the entire conflict. Previously classified documents show a clear pattern of official denial, at the highest levels of government, of the extent and impact of the loyalist assassination campaign.

When Jacob Zuma retires to Nkandla, what will be left behind?

South Africa has been in the grip of the “Zunami” since May 2009: Scandal, corruption and allegations of state capture have become synonymous with the Zuma era, leaving the country and its people disheartened. But Jacob Zuma’s time is running out. Whether he leaves the presidency after the ANC’s national conference in 2017, stays on until 2019, or is forced to retire much sooner, the question is: what impact will his departure have on South Africa, its people and on the ruling party? Can we fix the damage, and how?

Ralph Mathekga answers these questions and more as he puts Zumaʼs leadership, and what will come after, in the spotlight.

Just who is Radovan Krejcir? Known as “Baas John” to his underlings, he arrived in South Africa in 2007 under a false passport. He was a fugitive, a powerful Czech multimillionaire, who escaped from prison on fraud charges and fled to the good life in the Seychelles. But a bid by the Czech Republic to have him extradited saw Krejcir coming to South Africa. He was arrested at the airport, but an alleged bribe kept him in the country. Within a few years Krejcir had amassed great wealth and his name began being associated with underworld gang members such as Cyril Beeka and Lolly Jackson. It was the murder of Lolly Jackson that brought Krejcir’s name into the limelight and revealed his dealing with crime intelligence boss Joey Mabasa and small time criminal George Louka.

Over the next three years 10 more deaths took place, each one more dramatic than the next. He was also the victim of a bizarre James Bond style shoot out. His business Moneypoint exploded when a bomb left inside a bag blew up, killing two associates. Soon afterward Krejcir was arrested, but in true Krejcir fashion even a jail cell could not hold him down. Police foiled a plan to murder top cop Colonel Nkosana Ximba and forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan and to stop numerous escape attempts.

He has been found guilty and sentenced for kidnapping, attempted murder and attempted drug possession. He also faces charges for the murder of Sam Issa, the conspiracy to murder investigators and the murder of Phumlani Ncube, a hit man-turned informant. But Krejcir reveals why we have not heard the last of the worst crime boss South Africa has ever seen.

Late one evening, investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer receives an anonymous message offering him access to secret data. Through encrypted channels, he then receives documents revealing how the president of Argentina has sequestered millions of dollars of state money for private use. This is just the beginning.

Obermayer and fellow Suddeutsche journalist Frederik Obermaier find themselves immersed in the secret world where complex networks of shell companies help to hide people who don't want to be found. Faced with the largest data leak in history, they activate an international network of journalists to follow every possible line of enquiry. Operating in the strictest secrecy for over a year, they uncover cases involving prime ministers, dictators, kings, oligarchs, princelings, sports officials, big banks, arms smugglers, mafiosi, child prostitution rings, diamond miners, art dealers and celebrities.

The real-life thriller behind the story of the century, The Panama Papers is an intense, unputdownable account that proves, once and for all, that there exists a small elite living by a different set of rules and blows their secret world wide open.

The Big Fix gives the first detailed account of how South Africa paid $10 million to secure the 2010 World Cup.

Between June and July 2010, 64 games of football determined that Spain was the world’s best team at the World Cup in South Africa. South Africans – and the world – celebrated a brilliantly hosted tournament where everything worked like clockwork and the stands were packed with vuvuzela‐wielding fans. But the truth was not yet known. Behind this significant national achievement lay years of corporate skulduggery, crooked companies rigging tenders and match fixing involving the national team. As late as 2015 it was revealed that the tournament’s very foundations were corrupt when evidence emerged that South Africa had encouraged FIFA to pay money to a bent official in the Caribbean to buy three votes in its favour. As Sepp Blatter’s FIFA edifice crumbled, a web of transactions from New York to Trinidad and Tobago showed how money was diverted to allow South Africa’s bid to host the tournament to succeed.

In The Big Fix: How South Africa Stole The 2010 World Cup, Ray Hartley reveals the story of an epic national achievement and the people who undermined it in pursuit of their own interests. It is the real story of the 2010 World Cup.

The giant is falling takes a sweeping look at the big political events of recent years that signify the end of an era in South Africa. With declining popularity at the polls and the real possibility of losing the comfortable majority the ANC has enjoyed for two decades, the big debate in South Africa is whether or not the party can recover its reputation as the most respected liberation movement in the world? Locating the moment when things fell apart as the Marikana Massacre, the film charts the various ways people have collectively responded to the ANC’s failure to deliver on its promises. Bookmarked by the 2016 Local Elections, The giant is falling asks why South Africa, a middle-income country, rich in mineral wealth has failed to address inequality in twenty-two years of democracy and why the gap between rich and poor is growing. From the break with the trade unions, to the #FeesMustFall student movement, to the more recent crushing electoral losses at the polls for the ANC, this film provides an unflinching look at the festering sore of inequality that is making the current situation untenable. The question is when the status quo breaks, what will replace it?

"For a couple of months in the near perfect summer of 1990/1991, Jacob Zuma came to stay in my house in Norwood, Johannesburg… Twenty five years later, my former house guest has all but morally bankrupted Nelson Mandela's ruling African National Congress. President Zuma's vision-free leadership, corrupt personal behaviour and attempts to use his political power to distort the judicial system render him no better than Italy's corrupt bunga-bunga partying ex-prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi."

So begins God, Spies And Lies, the most explosive insider’s account since Mandela came to power, a never-before-seen insider’s account of how South Africa got here -- and how things went wrong. It takes you into the room with Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, into the Oval Office of the US President and the British Prime Minister’s Chequers country estate, as the fate of southern Africa was being set before and after 1994.

Among its revelations are:

• How Nelson Mandela studied the Afrikaner Broederbond to end white rule at the same time as he set up the military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961
• The story of the apartheid spy who fooled the white liberal elite
• What made George Bush Senior change his mind about white rule in Southern Africa
• How Robert Mugabe fooled South African intelligence
• Why South Africa missed the Information Economy
• What disillusioned Thabo Mbeki with the British Labour Party
• How Jacob Zuma came under the spell of the Chinese Communist Party.
• What it would take to get the country back on track

John Matisonn has had a bird’s eye view of South Africa’s progress through apartheid and democracy. As a political correspondent, foreign correspondent and one of the pioneers of democratic South Africa’s free broadcasting environment, he interacted with every ANC leader since Oliver Tambo and every government leader from John Vorster to Jacob Zuma. Now for the first time this seasoned and erudite insider reveals the secrets of a 40 year career observing the politicians, their spies and the journalists who wrote about them. As a patriot, he argues that the way to a better future can be found through an unvarnished examination of the past.