A family vacation aboard Disney Cruise Line’s Disney Dream took a terrifying turn when a father reportedly jumped into the ocean to save his daughter after she fell overboard.

Thanks to the response from the ship’s crew, both were rescued within minutes.

The June 29 incident occurred as the Disney Dream was returning to Fort Lauderdale following a four-night Bahamian itinerary, which included a stop at Disney’s new private destination, Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a Disney Cruise Line spokesperson confirmed the successful rescue:

“The Crew aboard the Disney Dream swiftly rescued two guests from the water. We commend our Crew Members for their exceptional skills and prompt actions, which ensured the safe return of both guests to the ship within minutes.”

BOAT CATCHES FIRE NEAR CAPE CANAVERAL, PASSENGERS SAVED

Passengers described the rescue in real time on social media. Kevin Furuta, who witnessed the incident, recounted in a Facebook post that a girl fell from the fourth deck.

“A girl fell overboard from the 4th deck & her dad went in after her,” she wrote. “Thankfully, the DCL rescue team was on it immediately and both were saved!”

SURVEILLANCE VIDEO CAPTURES MOMENT HEROIC STRANGER SAVES 6-YEAR-OLD FLORIDA BOY SINKING TO BOTTOM OF POOL

Dewayne Smith, another passenger, wrote that “Man Over Board” rang across the loudspeaker as rescue teams sprang into action.

“Lots of praying folks on this ship! Both the little girl and dad were both successfully rescued!” he wrote.

The rescue team launched life rings and deployed a rescue boat. There were no injuries reported in the incident.

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“We are committed to the safety and well-being of our guests, and this incident highlights the effectiveness of our safety protocols,” a Disney Cruise line spokesperson said.

The spokesperson did not confirm how the guests ended up in the water. Their ages were also not immediately released.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova reacted to the heinous ambush-style shooting in Idaho that left two firefighters dead and another wounded on Sunday.

The suspected sniper was identified as Wess Roley. Officials said Roley deliberately set a brush fire on Canfield Mountain, near Coeur d’Alene to lure first responders into a deadly trap, according to the Associated Press.

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“Our country is messed up…. RIP to the heroes who died and may the dead killer rot in some hellish place,” Navratilova wrote on X.

The Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office said fire crews initially responded to a blaze at Canfield Mountain just north of Coeur d’Alene. Audio released from the scene showed first responders calling for help.

Law enforcement launched a massive manhunt, tracking the suspected gunman through the terrain. Using cellphone data, a tactical team located Roley’s body several hours later in a wooded area near the origin point of the fire. A firearm was found nearby.

SUSPECTED SHOOTER IN IDAHO FIREFIGHTER AMBUSH IDENTIFIED

Officials have not yet confirmed whether he died by suicide or was fatally wounded during an exchange with authorities.

The identities of the two deceased firefighters have not been publicly released, pending notification of next of kin.

The third firefighter, who suffered critical injuries, underwent emergency surgery and remains in stable condition.

Fox News’ Sarah Rumpf-Whitten and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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South Dakota Rep. Dusty Johnson, the state’s sole member of the House, has announced a run for governor.

Johnson is chair of the House GOP’s Main Street Caucus and a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. He has served in Congress since 2019, following a job as vice president at a South Dakota-based engineering and consulting firm. Prior to his role as an executive, Johnson also worked as South Dakota Public Utilities commissioner from 2005 to 2011, during which he was appointed chief of staff to former Gov. Dennis Daugaard.    

The announcement, deemed by local media as a “formality” after Johnson was already rumored to run, came Monday at a campaign event and was paired with a video the representative shared on social media.

KEY HOUSE GOP MODERATE DON BACON WON’T SEEK RE-ELECTION

“I’s been such an honor to work for you in Congress. We rolled up our sleeves and got things moving in the right direction, cutting trillions in wasteful spending, standing with President Trump to secure our border and finally getting tough on China,” Johnson said. 

“Those were important fights to build a better country for our kids, but their future doesn’t begin in some far away place. It begins here, at home, in South Dakota. That’s why we need to hit the gas and give them a clear path to a bright future.”

TRUMP REACTS TO TILLIS NOT SEEKING RE-ELECTION, SENDS WARNING TO ‘COST CUTTING REPUBLICANS’

Following the announcement, criticism began popping up online that Johnson has not adequately supported President Donald Trump, and claims he is a “never-Trumper” are “lies of the desperate.”

“Here are the facts,” Johnson told Fox News Digital. “Donald Trump has had me down to Mar-a-Lago. I’ve gone to the Super Bowl with President Trump. I donated $10,000 to his re-election campaign years ago. He endorsed me in my 2020 race. I was his state campaign chairman for his re-elect.” 

Johnson added that he is someone who has “a long-standing, multi-year history of being a partner” with Trump.

Johnson also said he has proven to be a “key ally” of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R–La., noting he was one of the members of Congress who “helped deliver the votes to get him elected speaker.”

On the fight in the Senate over the Trump-endorsed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Johnson said he supports the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives and expressed optimism it will get passed by the Senate by the GOP’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.

As Yosemite Sam would say: “What in tarnation??”

A beachgoer in the Sunshine State happened upon an unusual discovery while enjoying a day on the sand over the weekend. 

Twenty-five mysterious black packages — each with an image of famous cartoon character Yosemite Sam — washed ashore on a Florida Panhandle beach on Sunday, according to the Walton County Sheriff’s Office.

The bricks contained a whopping $500,000 worth of cocaine, police said.

UK AUTHORITIES SEIZE COCAINE WORTH MORE THAN $130 MILLION FROM A SHIP AT LONDON PORT

“While enjoying our beautiful beaches, if you come across any square groupers, PLEASE call us immediately and DO NOT touch suspicious packages,” the sheriff’s office said in a social media post. “The contents could be extremely harmful. We’re here if you need us.”

Authorities subsequently confiscated the drugs and logged them into evidence. However, it’s not clear where the packages of drugs came from.

The Walton County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

SAN DIEGO AUTHORITIES ARREST 3 NONCITIZENS ALLEGEDLY INVOLVED IN TRANSPORTING MORE THAN $5M WORTH OF METH

The incident comes three days after a bundle of cocaine washed up on an Alabama shore, according to authorities. 

The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office received reports of suspicious packages located on the sands of the Fort Morgan Peninsula on Thursday, police said. 

Upon arriving on the beach, deputies retrieved the 150-pound packages and later determined they contained 50 individually wrapped kilos of cocaine, according to the department.

AUSTRALIAN AUTHORITIES INTERCEPT OVER A TON OF COCAINE WORTH $400M

“It is not uncommon for additional bundles of illicit contraband to surface,” the department said in a social media post, adding, “we ask the public not to open bundles or packages, as they could contain hazardous chemicals or dangerous drugs.” 

The sheriff’s office subsequently contacted the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to take over the case, according to the department’s statement. 

HSI did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced sweeping charges Monday against more than 300 defendants, alleging they misled patients into paying for, and sometimes receiving, medical care that they did not need.

In turn, DOJ Criminal Division chief Matthew Galeotti said, the defendants also attempted to swindle Medicare and other taxpayer-funded and private health insurance programs out of about $14.6 billion.

The announcement marked the “largest coordinated healthcare fraud takedown in the history of the Department of Justice,” Galeotti said during a press conference.

One set of charges included, for example, an indictment against three defendants in Arizona who allegedly conspired to purchase and give elderly Medicare recipients skin grafts known as “amniotic wound allografts.” The defendants allegedly reaped millions of dollars from the practice.

5.4 MILLION PATIENT RECORDS EXPOSED IN HEALTHCARE DATA BREACH

One of the defendants, a nurse practitioner, applied the grafts to patients even though they were “medically unreasonable and unnecessary,” the indictment said. The nurse allegedly applied them to terminally ill patients in hospice, including some who were days away from dying.

While that specific medical practice is typically non-invasive, Galeotti noted it was part of a $1 billion healthcare fraud scheme that stripped patients of “dignity and peace” in their final days. 

“That conduct is exactly as callous and disturbing as it sounds,” Galeotti said. “Patients and their families trusted these providers with their lives. Instead of receiving care, they became victims of elaborate criminal schemes.”

One DOJ official said in response to a question from Fox News Digital that skin grafts were an “emerging area” of healthcare fraud, “especially given the significant amount of money that they can bill for sometimes in excess of $1,000 a square centimeter.” 

The healthcare fraud cases, all of which were shared publicly online, spanned the country and globe. Defendants included medical supply company owners and medical professionals, including 25 doctors.

TEXAS DOCTOR SENTENCED TO 10 YEARS IN PRISON IN ONE OF THE ‘MOST SIGNIFICANT’ CASES OF PATIENT HARM

An FBI official announced at the press conference that one scheme, called “Operation Gold Rush,” resulted in at least 20 members of a transnational criminal organization, including defendants based in Russia, being charged as part of a $10 billion Medicare and money laundering operation that centered on catheters.

The DOJ Criminal Division’s healthcare fraud unit led the effort. Galeotti said Monday the DOJ also launched a “fusion center” in which it would join forces with other agencies to consolidate healthcare data as part of its investigations into fraud.

Galeotti and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, also used the press conference to make a plea for more tips.

“We need your help, the American people,” Oz said. “Why? Over half of the whistleblower tips that we get are for healthcare fraud and over half of the fraud against our government is in healthcare.”

Earlier this month, the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) Gallery at the University of Johannesburg inaugurated a dual exhibition that featured Senzeni Marasela’s Waiting and Remembering, from 7 to 22 June. 

The exhibition expanded Marasela’s commitment to art as public memory work. As a VIAD Research Associate and Thami Mnyele Foundation fellow, Marasela’s practice resonates far beyond local geographies — a transnational dialogue that bridges past, present and speculative futures.

Senzeni Marasela, born in 1977 in Thokoza, Gauteng, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, photography, textiles, video and installation. A graduate of the Wits School of Arts (1998), she explores themes of black South African womanhood, memory and displacement through archival materials and material culture. 

Marasela has exhibited widely, both locally and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) and the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. 

On 11 June, the artist, accompanied by her curator, the artist and researcher Refilwe Nkomo, led a walkabout at FADA. Throughout the tour, Marasela responded to audience questions with the same deliberate subtlety that animates her practice. 

Nkomo began by introducing the audience to how the exhibition is anchored in Maru Musi, a framework of black feminist scholarship. This anti-museum project, developed by Nkomo, resists the traditional archive and reimagines the exhibition as a space for belonging, justice, homing and refusal.

At the centre of Waiting and Remembering stands Theodorah, Marasela’s enduring alter ego. Since 2002, Theodorah has appeared as a woman searching for her missing husband, Gebane — a potent metaphor for loss, historical rupture and unresolved grief. 

Through photographic series beginning in 2004, and notably adopting the red dress, or iphinifa elibomvu, in 2013 as a performative garment, Theodorah traces journeys across Joburg’s haunted terrain — a city deeply marked by apartheid spatial violence and gendered displacement. 

As Marasela walked us through the show, which featured a majority of textile works, we began to see the centrality of questions of gender. The textile maps become mnemonic devices, their rings and strings symbolising cycles of loss, erasure and return. Marasela says X marks the last known location of Gebane. 

In other works, concentric rings depict mine dumps. Living in Soweto, Marasela is intimately attuned to the lingering spectres of mining — the decommissioned shafts, the unaccounted for men and the environmental and psychological scars left behind. 

The artist guided us through the space with an ease that can only come from familiarity. Though no longer donning the red dress, she still carries Theodorah’s journey with her. 

Describing her method as an “intimate cartographic intervention”, Marasela maps not streets but absences — tracing a palimpsest of hybrid histories through family memory, colonial residue and professional presence. Theodorah emerges then, not as a figure of nostalgia or ethnographic display, but as a vessel of black feminine memory. 

Marasela transforms fantasies of escape into embodied arrival, rooted in a history of women’s exclusion from formal work until 1952. Her red dress became a symbol of visibility and vulnerability, often provoking alienation, such as at New York’s JFK Airport, where she faced profiling based on this “look of poverty”. Embodying Theodorah, she was seen as an object of pity rather than a successful artist. 

Marasela uses this opacity to protect meaning, examining how visibility is negotiated in institutional spaces and how geography and racialised optics govern recognition.

This is palpable in Marasela’s use of textiles — not just the red dress but the checkered blanket or itshali. Far more than garments or shrouds, these materials become witnesses: to those who wore them, waited in them or disappeared from them. 

“These aren’t costumes,” she explained during the walkabout. “They’re lived things — propositions, documents, mourning cloths.” 

Marasela’s itshali — handwoven with red wool — traces psychic and geographic connections to Johannesburg’s fractured terrain. Although now seen as cultural symbols, the itshali is in fact a colonial import from Scotland, layered with both imposed and reclaimed meaning. 

But it is this title that most profoundly distills the philosophical essence of Marasela’s enduring practice. Waiting and Remembering summons situated epistemologies — evoking terms such as ukubekezela and ukukhumbula. These are not passive states; they are ritualised technologies of endurance — inflected by gender, shaped by vernacular cosmologies and laden with the psychic weight of historical repetition. 

In isiZulu, ukubekezela connotes more than patience; it gestures toward a spiritual poise in the face of sustained difficulty, a kind of embodied suspension that is often feminised and too often romanticised as silent suffering. 

Likewise, ukukhumbula is not mere recollection, but a summoning of the dead, the disappeared, the otherwise — a practice of memory that is as much spatial as it is ancestral.

In Marasela’s practice, waiting and remembering are not merely themes but methodologies of refusal and opacity that destabilise easy recognition. 

They function as recursive, relational strategies that make meaning both visible and withheld, demanding attunement rather than mastery. 

Through Theodorah’s journey, Waiting and Remembering maps Joburg as a fractured psychic terrain where violence and survival are entangled. Rather than offering an archive, the work leaves an afterimage — a lingering trace of history carried in the body.

Irish business leaders whose enterprises operate in Africa have appealed to other businesses to empower Africans, including young people, to increase agriculture and food production on the continent. 

Promoting education in Africa’s food sector, and bringing those individuals forward to lead projects, is key to unlocking the continent’s full potential, Chris Teeger of the Kerry Group — which owns the largest and most advanced taste facility in Africa — told a panel discussion at the Africa Ireland Trade Horizons conference in Dublin on Tuesday.

Many African countries have doubled the importation of agricultural food crops from outside the continent, even after the ratification of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). They imported $55 billion of food products in 2024 and that figure is expected to rise to $110 billion this year.

“We need to see the value in African people. The youth are the key. The spirit they bring to everything is everything. We need to take those local people and youth, educate them, unskill them and let them lead the future of the food production sector in Africa,” Teeger said. 

“We have employed many young people who are graduates from a vast number of universities and they have just grown and grown.”

He noted that there is no shortage of resources in Africa and that South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria are leading producers of rice, maize and wheat, adding: “We need to stop shipping commodities to Africa that are already available in Africa.”

Ivor Queally, the chief executive officer of QK Group South Africa, backed Teeger’s assessment of food production in the country.

The QK group entered South Africa in 2005 and is now a key role player in the cold storage market, boasting one of the leading meat packing facilities in the country. 

Queally recalled that the company had discovered early on that the process of starting operations in South Africa would not be easy.

“We realised early that there was a gap in terms of education and skills. We therefore had to set up schools to educate our employees. We then noticed a lot of absenteeism in schools and found out that HIV/Aids was a big problem in South Africa at the time and there were no ARVs available, so we then had to set up clinics to assist people with that,” he said.

The investment in people, rather than products, had proved a success, Queally added.

“When we entered South Africa, we brought in Irish people to train our employees. Now, we have no Irish employees in South Africa and we bring Africans to Europe to do training on this side.” 

Africa needs to be promoted in Europe to allow investment that can help the continent reach its full potential, both Queally and Teeger told the forum, adding that Europeans need to understand that opportunities in the food production sector are plenty and that the relationship between the two regions can be equal and mutually beneficial. 

The journalist’s trip to Ireland was sponsored by the Embassy of Ireland in South Africa.

South African retailers are quietly experimenting with advertising in video games, and the results are beginning to reshape how brands connect with younger audiences. 

There are about 26.5 million gamers in the country, and nearly 92% of internet users play games on smartphones. Brands are now moving out of malls and into virtual worlds in ways that have major implications for local commerce and marketing strategies.

According to Statista, as of quarter 3 of 2023, of the 92% internet users, 78% play on smartphones and 48% use desktops or laptops. 

Newzoo data shows nearly half of South African gamers are aged 14 to 28, and the local gaming industry generated R7.3 billion ($266 million) in revenue in 2023 — a 52% year‑on‑year increase, with 91% of that coming from mobile titles. 

The latest data from Statista shows that gamers spend barely R480 annually on games. 

But gaming is no longer only about entertainment; it has become a ground for marketing. Platform providers and ad-tech companies are quietly partnering with brands to monetise in-game spaces through sponsorships, digital product placements and immersive brand activations.

The most visible example is Roblox, which recently introduced e-commerce tools — Commerce APIs and Shopify integration—that allow brands to sell real-world goods inside games. 

With nearly 98 million daily users globally and 62% of them aged 13 and above, the platform is effectively positioning itself as a digital shopping mall for Gen Z. Users spent 21.7 billion hours on the platform in quarter 4 of 2024 — about 2.4 hours a day per user. 

Microsoft-owned Minecraft has taken a subtler route, using sponsored educational content and experiential builds to connect with audiences. There’s no direct shopping involved, but brand presence earns goodwill and soft engagement in curated digital spaces.

Statista says the scope of advertising within games on smartphones tends to stay at basic formats such as banners or sponsored currency, rather than fully immersive retail experiences.

The esports or electronic sports space in South Africa offers a third hybrid model. The local market, priced at $26.4 million in 2024, has grown through events such as the MTN Shift Gaming Experience, a nationwide Fifa tournament hosted at multiple malls. These tournaments anchor brand visibility in offline worlds, while also streaming online.

But, according to esports users, problems persist. A Reddit discussion by South African gamers highlights barriers — expensive hardware and software, bureaucratic import delays, unstable connectivity and load-shedding — which make seamless online brand experiences harder to achieve. 

“I just keep track of the load-shedding times and play around with them. I learned my lesson the hard way after playing competitive games and suddenly losing power,” one user said. 

Users report that console prices in South Africa — typically R 7 000 to R 10 000 — are often double what consumers pay in Europe or the United States, because of import duties and a weaker rand.

In South Africa, brands like Reebok and local mobile providers have already begun integrating into the gaming space by sponsoring esports tournaments and exploring digital product placements.

Some international brands have already adapted. Fenty Beauty relaunched its shoppable Roblox experience in May 2025, allowing US players over 18 to buy real products such as an exclusive lip gloss directly from within the game. 

e.l.f. Cosmetics, known for blending financial literacy and beauty in its Roblox activations, continues to experiment with deeper commerce tools.

Platforms such as Fortnite, which have worked with brands like Ralph Lauren and Balenciaga, provide similar opportunities, though Roblox’s user-generated world offers a more native environment for these experiments.

Chris Camacho, chief executive of UK-based agency Cheil, summed up the shift by saying, “For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, seeing an avatar in a hoodie, a lipstick or a pair of trainers and being able to buy the real thing on the spot just makes sense.”

According to gaming analyst agency Games Industry Africa, the African gaming market is expected to surpass $1.8 billion in revenue in 2025, driven overwhelmingly by mobile gaming. The market did reach $1.8 billion in revenue in 2024, with South Africa remaining the continent’s leading market.

Michiel Buijsman, principal games market analyst at Newzoo, said: “Africa’s gaming sector is growing rapidly and outpacing global trends, which signals that the continent is catching up and its growth cannot be overlooked. With a fast-growing mobile online population and 90% of its $1.8 billion market coming from mobile gaming, it’s clear where growth opportunities can be found.”

Global advertising agency Dentsu reports that 63% of African gamers have purchased something after seeing an in-game ad, while 44% criticise the lack of culturally relevant content.

Empire does not begin with bombs. It begins with stories. Before missiles strike, a narrative must be written to make the target bombable. Colonial narrative, as postcolonial historian Ranajit Guha shows in A Conquest Foretold, transforms conquest into destiny. It prepares the public to accept war as not only inevitable but righteous.

It is not simply that Iran was bombed on 13 June 2025. It is that the idea of Iran and its right to hold memory, to produce knowledge, to exist as a civilisational subject was already rendered illegible.

The Israeli assault on Iran was defended in familiar terms — an imminent nuclear threat, national security, surgical precision. But these are not explanations. They are scripts. Like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the attack on Iran was rationalised through an architecture of claims that do not require evidence, only repetition. Intelligence reports denying Iran’s weapons programme were irrelevant. The narrative had already been written.

Guha’s insight is clear — Empire writes the future in advance. The British conquest of India was not sealed at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. That battle was a minor military affair. And yet, in British imperial historiography, Plassey was elevated to a grand foundational moment, the start of British rule in India, the point at which the East India Company became a territorial power. 

As Guha points out, it was this narrative that was repeated in schoolbooks, official dispatches and parliamentary speeches. It provided the ideological foundation for expanding British rule. While the real event was modest and sordid, the story told about it became grand and civilisational.

Guha painstakingly shows that conquest must be justified, not just enacted. He draws from the writings of figures like Robert Orme, an official historian of the East India Company, who openly declared that “the sword is the charter”. This chilling phrase captures the heart of imperial logic — that might creates right. Violence, if victorious, rewrites itself as law. The act of domination becomes the foundation of legitimacy. 

What Guha reveals is that empires do not just win battles, they write the laws and the history books. They tell the story in such a way that the destruction appears noble, even necessary. The conquered are not only defeated on the ground; they are also written out of history.

This symbolic process, Guha argues, is what transforms the “instant of aggression” into the logic of rule. The colonial archive did not record India’s conquest merely as fact. It reworked it as a historical necessity, a fulfilment of a moral and civilisational order. This allowed future wars, occupations and annexations to be narrated not as violence, but as destiny. Guha calls this “a conquest foretold”, a fate legitimised before it is ever enforced.

This continues today. The West does not simply bomb places. It un-names them. In the mainstream media, Iran is rarely presented as a site of knowledge, history or intellectual contribution. It is a shadow space: nuclear, irrational, volatile, fanatical, alien, frightening. Colonial narratives render people fungible, bombable and, ultimately, forgettable. They reduce cities to targets, its people to collateral and magnificent civilisational archives to dust.

Literary theorist Edward Said showed clearly that the Orient was never just misunderstood. It was constructed. It was imagined as timeless, barbaric, hyper-religious and fundamentally unfit for self-rule. This epistemic violence enabled actual violence. When the drones strike, they do so on the back of a long intellectual history that emptied the East of sovereignty.

Said’s Orientalism is a study of how European and American thinkers created a fictional image of the East, a world of despots, harems, fanaticism and mystery. This fantasy was not harmless. It underpinned policy, war and occupation. Said wanted readers to understand that power works not only through tanks and armies, but also through language, maps and books. 

How we speak about a place, whether on TV or in schools, shapes what we believe can or should happen to it. When the East is painted as irrational and dangerous, bombing it becomes not a horror, but a duty.

Orientalism, Said shows, is not an error of perception. It is a system of power. Through universities, literature, policy and media, the West defined the East as the inverse of itself: irrational, feminine, despotic. This representation justified intervention. If the East could not govern itself, then governance must be imposed from without. Once internalised, this logic rendered bombing not only possible but legible as order, as responsibility, as peacekeeping. Violence becomes virtue.

Iran has a long and magnificent intellectual history. The Academy of Gundishapur in Khuzestan, Iran, was one of the oldest universities in the world. Founded in the third century CE, it was a centre for multilingual scholarship where Sanskrit medical texts were translated into Middle Persian, Greek logic was systematised and Babylonian astronomy refined. It was here that clinical observation became a method of medical teaching, surgery was formalised and knowledge travelled across linguistic and cultural lines, centuries before Oxford opened its gates in 1096 or Cambridge in 1209.

The very model of the Western university, its division into faculties, the logic of disputation, the canon of philosophy and science, was shaped by Iranian and Islamic precedents. The Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Abbasid Baghdad, deeply influenced by Persian scholarship, became the template for later European institutions. 

When Arabic and Persian texts were translated into Latin in Andalusia and Sicily, they were not curiosities, they were the architecture of another world being absorbed. There would be no scholastic tradition without al-Farabi and al-Tusi, no experimental method without al-Razi and no algebra without al-Khwarizmi.

These networks extended even further south. Persian texts and Islamic jurisprudence travelled along trans-Saharan trade routes into West Africa. At Sankoré University in Timbuktu, scholars studied Avicenna and al-Ghazali alongside local astronomers and jurists. Libraries in desert towns preserved manuscripts copied in Persian script. These were not isolated developments. They formed part of an intellectual system that preceded and shaped the European Enlightenment.

From Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikma to the libraries of Timbuktu, Persian and Arabic texts travelled along trade routes, translated, adapted and taught across generations. The commentaries of al-Farabi, al-Tusi and Avicenna informed the very structure of the Western university. Algebra, optics and medicine — none of these can be understood without Iran.

This history was not just ignored by European colonialism. It was actively erased. During colonial rule in India, the British administration removed Persian as a court and scholarly language, replacing it with English and thereby severing centuries of transregional intellectual continuity between South Asia, Central Asia and the Iranian plateau. Persian manuscripts were stripped of context and displayed as exotic artefacts in museums. Its philosophy was recast as mysticism. Its scientific legacy was reduced to footnotes or omitted altogether.

Tabriz, struck in the June 2025 attack, is not just a military site. It is the city of Shams al-Din Tabrizi, Rumi’s teacher and a centre of Persian mysticism and learning. It is a node in a centuries-old network of philosophy, theology, mathematics, astronomy and poetry that spanned from Khurasan to Mali. These were not isolated traditions. They were the foundations of a civilisational archive beyond the borders and imagination of Europe.

And yet, in the dominant Western imagination, Iran is nothing but a sinister, irrational enemy of the West.

This is not ignorance. It is design. It is an instance of what Guha and Said both expose: the strategic construction of the South as a site of absence. A place whose people are forgettable, whose knowledge is disposable, whose destruction is thinkable.

We have seen this before. Iraq’s libraries were looted. Mosul’s university was razed. Gaza’s schools, universities and archives were bombed into nothingness. In each case, what is attacked is not just infrastructure but the right to remember, to dream, to transmit. Epistemic erasure is not collateral damage. It is the method of neocolonial domination.

To centre the epistemic is not to look away from the dead. It is to insist that their lives were lived in full. It is to understand that the people of Iran are not footnotes to someone else’s future. That they are authors, carriers of meaning and custodians of a world that Empire has tried again and again to silence.

This war, like all imperial wars, is not just about sovereignty. It is about the terms of knowledge. Who gets to define history. Who gets to remember. 

Until we refuse the stories that make us invisible and tell our own stories, we will never escape the imperial forces that deny our full and equal humanity.

Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist.

South Africa’s carbon-intensive export model faces rising risks in a global economy that is increasingly shaped by climate policy, clean energy industrial strategies and cross-border carbon pricing.

This is according to a new report released by Net Zero Tracker, which noted that, as countries ratchet up decarbonisation to meet their Paris Agreement climate commitments, the clean energy transition is redrawing the global trade map. 

“South Africa’s formal net zero target for 2050 sits uneasily alongside short-term energy decisions that prioritise fossil fuel expansion and delay coal phase-out,” the analysis from researchers at Net Zero Tracker said, adding that this is undermining confidence in the country’s decarbonisation trajectory and exposing its carbon-intensive exports to growing international risk.

Overall, 78% of South Africa’s exports, worth $135 billion, are sold to countries with net zero targets, supporting 1.2 million domestic jobs — or 7.5% of national employment in 2023.

The report found that 422 000 South African jobs are tied to exports to economies with active or incoming carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs), with almost 90 000 linked to countries considering similar measures. 

CBAMs involve the imposition of a carbon tariff on imported goods, based on the level of embedded emissions in the goods and the carbon price paid by the manufacturers thereof in the country of origin. 

China, South Africa’s largest trading partner, imported $31.1 billion in goods and services in 2023, more than 98% from sectors where the emissions intensity of the country’s production exceeds that of China, Net Zero Tracker said.

“As China moves to price domestic carbon more systematically, these sectors may face growing carbon scrutiny. As climate policies like CBAMs gain traction, there is a risk that Global South countries like South Africa are unfairly penalised, despite having low historical and per capita emissions.”

The Basic group — Brazil, South Africa, India, and China — has criticised CBAMs as an “unfair shifting of responsibilities from developed to developing countries”, warning they

could “aggravate the trust deficit amongst parties”, the analysis noted.

“For developed countries, closing this trust gap and aligning trade with international equity requires upholding the Paris Agreement principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and ensuring unilateral measures like CBAMs are paired with financial, technical and capacity support for developing economies,” it said.

Key sectors under threat

Alongside government policy, multinational companies are decarbonising supply chains, increasing the economic costs of inaction for countries that lag on driving decarbonisation of their electricity grids.

In South Africa’s 10 largest export markets, 323 major companies — representing $11 trillion in annual revenue — have full value chain net zero commitments, “meaning South African firms in their supply chains will have to measure and reduce their own emissions”.

South Africa’s key export industries face especially acute exposure, according to the report, which said that mining and basic metals made up over 50% of South Africa’s export value in 2023, supporting more than 404 000 jobs.  

The country’s  basic metals sector has nearly twice the embodied carbon dioxide emissions of its next most carbon-intensive peer country, accounting for 32% of exports and 14% of GDP.  More than 80% of basic metals exports go to net zero-aligned markets, and 30% — worth $16.7 billion and supporting 23,000 jobs — go to countries with active or incoming CBAMs.

The automotive sector, South Africa’s third-largest exporter, is also at risk with 65% of its export value being exposed to CBAMs that are either active, incoming or under discussion. 

“South Africa’s embodied carbon dioxide emissions from auto manufacturing are the second highest in the world, and while existing CBAM schemes are currently focussed on raw materials their scope is expected to expand, so a proactive approach to mitigating this risk will be rewarded.”

In agriculture, South Africa faces growing competitive pressure from lower-emissions suppliers, the report said. Across all top agricultural export categories and destination markets, alternative producers exist with at least three times lower embodied emissions — and are poised to scale into those markets.

‘Environmental colonialism’ 

With the second-highest carbon intensity of electricity generation among major economies (behind only India), and high embodied emissions in goods, South Africa’s exports will become more vulnerable. This has implications for jobs and tackling poverty in one of the world’s most unequal societies, the analysis said.

“Yet South Africa also holds key advantages: world-class renewable energy resources, critical minerals essential to the global transition and access to major trade and diplomatic frameworks, including Brics.”

The country is a leading producer of platinum group metals, manganese, vanadium and chromium, which are critical to clean energy technologies, such as hydrogen fuel cells, batteries and wind turbines, the report said. The researchers noted, too, that the International Energy Agency projects that the country will surpass its target of nearly 30 gigawatts of total renewable capacity by 2030, as outlined in its Integrated Resource Plan.

As the US administration undermines the multilateral rules-based system, and the global trade landscape shifts beneath its feet, South Africa’s path forward is clear, according to the authors. This is to “pivot both geographically and strategically from climate laggard to leader in climate-aligned, trade-competitive growth”.

This path, however, hinges on developed countries, especially those backing South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership — the UK, EU, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands — delivering on their commitment to support the country’s clean energy transition. 

“These governments should carefully address concerns expressed by South Africa’s government and industries to avoid CBAMs from being seen as ‘environmental colonialism’ or overly protectionist,” the researchers urged.

“Climate-related trade measures like CBAMs should be accompanied by finance and capacity-building support — otherwise these policies risk further entrenching inequality and reinforcing the perception that wealthy countries are protecting their own industry while ‘kicking away the ladder’ for others.”