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Politics
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Finance Minister Fights E-Toll Ruling In Concourt
23 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Finance Minster, Pravin Gordhan, has warned that South Africa would face a dark economic future if the interdict temporarily halting the e-toll project wasn’t set aside urgently. We’d have to brace ourselves for negative international credit ratings. And essential services to schools, hospitals and roads would also be adversely affected, he said.
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Egyptians Go To The Polls For The First Time In Five Thousand Years
23 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Today Egyptians will be able to go to the polls and elect their leader in a democratic fashion for the first time in their recorded history. Who are the frontrunners for Hosni Mubarak’s old job, and can Egyptians expect a smooth transition?
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Anonymous Hacks U.S. Department of Justice
22 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Oh hey, that V-for-Vendetta-themed hacker collective is back, this time with a 1,7 GB lump of data that they claim “used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics.” The file was uploaded to the Pirate Bay yesterday, and allegedly contains “internal emails, and the entire database dump.”
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Chicago Police Mow Down “Occupy” Protesters With A Van [VIDEO]
21 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
So there was a NATO summit ongoing in Chicago over the weekend – which naturally attracts a couple of protest groups, members from the “Occupy” movement among them. It also attracted police and Homeland Security, who proceeded to handcuff protesters, detain them at gunpoint, and ram into a crowd of them with a van.
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Assange Stands “Real Chance” Of Election In Australia
21 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Because apparently having your own talk show for starting a thing on the internet isn’t enough, recent polling of Australia’s Labor Party suggests that the Wikileaks founder is reasonably likely to get elected to the Australian senate, should he choose to go ahead with plans to run.
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Pakistan Blocks Twitter Over Cartoon Contest
21 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Pakistan yesterday temporarily banned Twitter in the region. The move was in response to a competition on Facebook called Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, now in its third year. The competition encourages entrants to draw caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, and Pakistan authorities actually used censorship to quell the spread of images, unlike South African authorities who dealt with a similar “caricature” incident on Friday.
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Europe Is Working On Emergency Plans For Greek Euro Exit
18 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
European officials have secretly been working on a plan for the worst-case scenario that at this point, seems possible: a Greek exit from the Euro. German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said earlier this week that she didn’t want Greece to leave. But with fresh Greek elections set for mid-June, elections that have already been dubbed as a major showdown between Greece and the rest of Europe, anything could happen.
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Iran Is Threatening To Sue Google Inc.
18 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
I know, today was supposed to be Facebook’s special moment, but when a sovereign state threatens to sue a corporation like Google, it’s sort of a thing. Especially when a sovereign state sues a corporation because of a disagreement over how a map should be labelled. Seriously.
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SA Communist Party Berates “Elitist” Gautrain, Yet Had Stake In Project From Outset
18 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The South African Communist Party (SACP) has for many years publicly denounced the building of the state-of-the-art Gautrain, criticising it for being beyond the means of the average worker and for bypassing black townships. Ironically, it’s just been discovered that the party has had an indirect stake in the project from the get-go.
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Zuma Swears Allegiance To Youth Wage Subsidy
17 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
President Jacob Zuma has said his government will stand firmly by their plan to implement a planned wage subsidy aimed at cutting youth unemployment. Its specifications will still be negotiated, but his reassurance comes days after violence flared up at a march where the DA tried to march on Cosatu House to highlight Cosatu’s opposition to the scheme.
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Support For Malema Drops Among Young People
16 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Only one in five people support what Julius Malema says and does. A survey among 2 000 metropolitan adults, conducted in April 2012 (before the disgraced ANC Youth League leader was expelled from the ANC), revealed that overall, Juju’s backing from the public – particularly from young people – is nothing to write home about.
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Former Crime Boss Mdluli Avoids Serving Of Court Papers
16 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Richard Mdluli, South Africa’s former crime intelligence boss yesterday “evaded” the serving of court papers by the legal rights group, Freedom Under Law (FUL).
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NASA Planning Manned Asteroid Mission
16 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
NASA will start training a team astronauts to land on an asteroid in the next month, in preparation for a mission that will take humans farther from Earth than ever before. They’ll be collecting mineral samples and determining how to destroy an asteroid in the event that it might collide with the Earth. Seriously.
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Cosatu Says Violence At Yesterday’s DA March “Justified”
16 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
In a statement following yesterday’s DA-led protest in Johannesburg that turned violent, spokesperson for Cosatu Patrick Craven praised Cosatu members for causing the DA protest’s ignominious retreat and said the Cosatu response was justified.
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Violence Breaks Out At DA March, Journalist Injured [PICS]
15 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The DA’s march against Cosatu in the Johannesburg city centre became violent earlier. Cosatu members allegedly stormed the march and rocks were thrown. In the process, DA supporters and a journalist from the Mail & Guardian were injured after being hit with stones.
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Banksy’s Latest Piece Spotted In London
15 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Because nothing happens in Merrie England without Banksy offering some sort of comment on it, a new piece has been spotted near Poundland showing a child laborer at work sewing Union Jacks. Apparently this has something to do with Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. Take a look! It’ll be a postcard soon.
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BREAKING: Rebekah Brooks Charged Over Hacking Scandal
15 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
News has just emerged that Former News Of The World editor, Rebekah Brooks, and her racehorse trainer husband Charlie Brooks, have been charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to the phone-hacking scandal.
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Patricia De Lille: “Obamas Should Get Freedom Of Cape Town”
15 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 3 Comments
Patricia de Lille is about to fire off a proposal to award the Freedom of the City of Cape Town to Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. According to Cape Town’s mayor, the couple exuded leadership, excellence and inclusion, which made them “natural candidates for the city’s highest accolade.”
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They’re Going To Have A Freddie Mercury Hologram, Too
15 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
When Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, was asked if he’d want a hologram Freddie Mercury a la Tupac – he declined, saying “I don’t want to appear with a hologram of my dear friend.” Which is unfortunately ambiguous wording, because they’ve decided to conjure up a Mercury hologram at tonight’s 10th anniversary We Will Rock You musical.
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Treasury Recommends Police Reduce Staff By 9 000
14 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
This morning the Treasury issued a report in which it recommended that the SAPS reduce staff by 9 000. In a country with one of the highest crime rates in the world, the recommendation seems questionable at best.
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Zille Shrugs Off Calls To Resign As “Political Posturing” Following Public Protector Report
14 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
DA Leader Helen Zille was under the spotlight after a new report written on behalf of Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, alleged that lawful process was not followed in a recent tender procurement by the Western Cape government. Zille has previously spoken out against corruption by stating that she would resign should any tender be found corrupt.
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Millions Of Rands Worth Of Textbooks Dumped At Eastern Cape Warehouse
14 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
After receiving a tip-off, the Sunday Times on Friday discovered that millions of rands worth of school textbooks had simply been dumped at a warehouse in King William’s Town, in the Eastern Cape.
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Nehawu Wants FW De Klerk Stripped Of Nobel Prize
14 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
After his “blacks were not disenfranchised” statement on CNN last week, former president F.W. de Klerk has been taking a lot of flack. Not only did he get ripped a new one by cartoonist Zapiro in the Sunday Times yesterday, but Nehawu is now calling for him to be stripped of his Nobel Peace Prize.
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Billion-Dollar Ghost Town Being Built For Science
14 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Hey there, science fiction. Defence contractor, Pegasus Global Holdings is building a replica of Rock Hill, a South Carolina city, in the middle of the New Mexico desert as a testing ground for futuristic infrastructures – self-driving cars, green buildings and next-generation Wi-Fi. It’ll be an uninhabited laboratory – they’re calling it “an amusement park for scientists.”
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Blogger Walks Through Moscow With AK-47, Police Do Nothing [PICS]
11 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 3 Comments
This is a little embarrassing for the Russian police. A Russian blogger recently decided to try a little experiment – he took a replica AK-47, hung it around his neck, and walked through the centre of Moscow to see if anything would happen. Not one police officer stopped him. See the pictures from his experiment after the jump.
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Argentina Approves World’s Most Progressive Transgender Bill Of Rights
11 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Suddenly Obama’s declaration that people of the same sex should be allowed to marry seems a little stale. Argentina has just approved a gender rights bill that will allow all adult citizens to change their legal sex at will — without undergoing surgery or hormone replacement therapy.
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FW De Klerk On CNN: “Blacks Were Not Disenfranchised” [VIDEO]
11 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 11 Comments
Former SA president, FW De Klerk, spoke with CNN’s chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour in an interview screened last night, revealing some alarming thoughts he has on the legacy of apartheid in South Africa, and his relationship with Nelson Mandela today.
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More Than 30 000 Positions Stand Vacant In The Local Government Sector
11 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
We know; we also thought it was some kind of elaborate joke, or that we’d been mistaken for seeing an extra zero. We hadn’t. And nor is it a joke. The South African Municipal Workers Union is demanding that all vacant positions in the Local Government Sector be filled as a matter of urgency. Which makes sense, because that would benefit a lot of people.
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The Floating Tech Start Up Haven Is Becoming A Reality
10 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 2 Comments
Venture capitalist, Peter Theil’s dream of an artificial island utopia for tech start-ups is inching closer to reality off the coast of San Francisco. Riding a wave of investment capital from Thiel, the project has a name – “Blueseed” – and a website, as well as a lengthy lineup of tech companies that want to get on board.
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Racist Ranting Itumeleng Mabeba Says He Was Hacked
10 May 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
A short while ago, Jessica Leandra dos Santos and Tshidi Thamana seemed to try to apologise for their recent actions, as well as form some kind of friendship. But Itumeleng Mabeba, a man at the centre of hate speech allegations for sending a very disturbing tweet, has claimed his Twitter account was hacked. His employer is also instituting an internal disciplinary process against him.
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