Latest news with #PretoriaBoysHighSchool
IOL News
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- IOL News
Ed Sheeran concert sets record attendance figures: headlines from back in the day
Shivers' by Ed Sheeran is the best song to sing in the shower with a final shower singing score of 8.87 /10. With a high energy rating of 86/100. 1839 In Humen, Chinese official Lin Tse-hsü destroys 1.2 million kg of opium confiscated from British merchants, providing Britain with a reason to start the First Opium War. 1899 The great WG Grace plays his last day of Test cricket, aged 50 years and 320 days. 1901 The Staatsmodelskool opens as the Pretoria Boys High School. 1934 Dr Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, is knighted. 1935 The French liner SS Normandie sets an Atlantic crossing record of four days, three hours and 14 minutes on her maiden voyage. The modern Queen Mary II can do it in 5 days, but usually makes the crossing in 7. 1937 Britain's King Edward VIII marries US divorcee Wallis Simpson after abdicating. 1940 The last British soldiers are evacuated from Dunkirk while French troops allow them to get away by forming a rear guard. 1940 Nazi official Franz Rademacher moots making Madagascar the 'Jewish homeland'. 1946 The first bikini is displayed in Paris. 1962 Air France Flight 007 overshoots the runway and explodes in Paris, killing 130. 1973 A Soviet Tupolev Tu-144, AKA Concordski, disintegrates in mid-air at the Paris Air Show. 14 people died. It is the first crash of a supersonic passenger aircraft. 1984 A military offensive by the Indian government at Harmandir Sahib, the holiest shrine for Sikhs, in Amritsar, begins. It will cause more than 5 000 casualties. 2012 The Diamond Jubilee pageant of Britain's Elizabeth II takes place on the River Thames to mark her 60 years on the throne. 2014 Hashim Amla becomes the first non-white captain of the Proteas. 2018 A dead whale is found with 7kg of plastic in its stomach on a beach in Thailand. 2019 A Canadian government inquiry finds that the deaths of more than 1 000 indigenous women and girls, who were murdered or went missing and never found, to be 'genocide'. 2019 Jay-Z is the world's first billionaire rapper, says Forbes magazine. 2023 An Ed Sheeran concert sets an attendance record at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The concert pulled in 77 900 people. DAILY NEWS
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Musk's Dad: Elon's Not Racist—He Was Friends With ‘Black Servants'
Elon Musk's dad tried to prove his son wasn't racist in all the wrong ways. Errol, the 79-year-old father of the world's richest man, insisted that his children were not into 'political nonsense' while growing up in apartheid-era South Africa. 'We had several black servants who were their friends,' Errol touted in an email to The Washington Post in response to questions about his son's hostility toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Errol fondly recalled the South Africa of Elon's childhood—during which the country was run by a white supremacist regime that kept its Black-majority population in poverty and under strict racial segregation—as a 'well-run, law abiding country with virtually no crime at all.' The Musk patriarch said he worked as an engineer and imported emeralds from an unregistered Zambian mine, which 'helped me and my two boys sustain ourselves during the collapse of Apartheid in SA.' Musk bragged about his father's share in an emerald mine in a 2014 interview but began to distance himself from it in the years that followed. In 2021, the billionaire claimed 'there's no evidence whatsoever of an 'emerald mine.'' Speaking about the mine, Errol told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson: 'If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.' Rudolph Pienaar, who graduated with Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988, told The Post that the Musks grew up 'in a bubble of entitlement,' shielded from the realities of oppression under the white supremacist system that persisted until 1994. 'I am not sure if Elon can conceive of systematic discrimination and struggle because that's not his experience,' he said. 'His life now in some ways is how it was under apartheid—rich and entitled with the entire society built to sustain him and his ilk.' As he shot to the top of Silicon Valley, Musk became known as an environmentally conscious entrepreneur. In 2017, he left the first Trump administration's business advisory council after the president announced that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. In recent years, however, Musk has positioned himself as an outspoken critic of 'woke' culture and has made purging DEI initiatives from the government one of his top priorities as chief of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. Last month, Musk reinstated Marko Elez to DOGE after he was fired over racist X posts. Among other inflammatory statements, Elez had called for the Civil Rights Act to be repealed and said: 'Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.' Musk's political transformation has made him a darling of the far-right not just in the U.S. but all over the globe. The tech mogul has thrown his weight behind the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). During Trump's second inauguration, Musk caused a stir when he threw out his arm in a gesture that many have likened to the Nazi salute. Gideon Fourie, another former classmate of Musk who now lives in Germany, told The Post that he was shocked by Musk's support for AfD. 'I am incredibly sensitive to racism because of where I came from, and for him to support this far-right party really blows my mind,' Fourie said. 'Everything that has happened in the last few years was very contrary to the trajectory I thought he was on.'
