The ANC’s Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, has thrown down the gauntlet to South Africa’s relations with so-called developed Western countries, including the USA and the Eurozone, in favour of cash-rich developing countries like China and India. Is South Africa banking on the East in spite of the West?
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?
Namibia’s MTC (Mobile Telecommunications Company) rolled out Africa’s second 4G LTE network in capital Windhoek today, but don’t fret, South African high-speed data desirers, because our local companies have some good reasons for pause in rolling out 4G locally. Well, so they say…
“So many of us look to the wisdom of the East, to solve our problems in the West.” Those are the words of filmmaker Vikram Ghandi, who set out to see how to see legitimate many of the sources of Eastern wisdom were, by impersonating a guru and then gaining a massive, legitimate following. Click through for the trailer and more details.
Marking another notch in the slow build-up to the sequel to that thing you used to like to quote, here’s the teaser trailer for Paramount’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. There’s no hint of story, but it reintroduces the Channel 4 News Team and offers some vague one-liners. Which I guess is what sequels are all about.
Japan just opened its tallest tourist attraction yet, the much-anticipated 634 metre tall Skytree tower in Tokyo. It took four years to build, cost 65 million Yen to make, is about twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower, just beats out the 600m tall Canton Tower in China, and even survived the devastating earthquakes that rocked Japan about a year ago, barely denting its construction schedule.
Apple’s Tim Cook and Samsung’s Choi Gee-sung were instructed by a San Francisco federal judge to meet for a two-day mediation to help resolve a high-profile US patent case. The companies are locked in bitter patent litigation all over the world, and the judge diarised the meeting to take place yesterday and today, with the intention of bringing one of the many cases to a close.
Our friends from FEMEN, the topless Ukrainian protest group, have struck again – this time at the Euro 2012 trophy display in Poland. They are protesting the prestigious sporting event and the economies of prostitution and sex trafficking that spring up around it. See their passionate cries for justice after the jump.
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.”
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.
The hotly anticipated third outing for Daniel Craig’s 007, Skyfall, dropped its first teaser trailer at the Cannes Film Festival.
This past Saturday the official Olympic torch relay began, with 8 000 lucky torchbearers chosen to be a part of history. However, a number of them have chosen short-lived wealth over Olympic legacy as they headed for e-Bay to sell off their unique pieces of history, for exorbitant amounts of cash.
This will surely go down as the most controversial IPL tournament thus far. South African bowler, Wayne Parnell, was among two IPL cricketers arrested and held for questioning after police in Mumbai busted a rave party in the city. Initially they detained about 100 people, officials said earlier. Police also confiscated 110 grams of cocaine, and ecstasy from the party.
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.
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.
Residents and art lovers in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia are up in arms this week as a local work of street art by world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy was inadvertently destroyed by a building contractor installing plumbing into a wall of a café. Full story and video after the jump.
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.
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.
So Google’s trying to change things, again. For those of you who decide that this is the last straw and that you’re going Bing, farewell and good luck finding anything. For those of you wanting to find out what exactly Knowledge Graph is and why it isn’t as terrible as G+, click on through.
Science! Technology! In a worldwide medical first, researchers have successfully implanted a computer-mind interface into the motor cortex of a 58-year-old, quadriplegic woman which allowed her to control a robotic limb using only the power of her mind. The future is now.
Pinterest, the hottest social photo sharing website right now, looks set to receive a nice $50 million injection from Japanese giant, Raukten. Plus another reported $70 million coming in from other international investors! This means that Pinterest’s valuation is now in the range of between $1 billion and $1,5 billion. Impressively, they’ve only been around for two years.
Branding! It’s good for you. Jump Studios, a London-based architecture firm, recently finished up the interior on a submarine for Guinness’ deep-sea bar, which plunged to the depths of the Baltic on its maiden voyage. The sub was commissioned to celebrate Guinness’ 250th anniversary. Take a look at the thing after the jump.
In the wake of his words against marriage equality, boxer Manny Pacquiao faces possible loss of sponsorship and is certainly a less popular figure around Los Angeles at the moment. Now he, and his spokesperson, have spoken out against the backlash, and clarified the statement that got the WBO Welterweight champion in such hot water.
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.
World Boxing Organisation Welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao, considered by many as one of the finest boxers currently active in the sport, has come out strongly in opposition to U.S. President Barack Obama’s statement of support for marriage equality in the United States, issued last week. Actually, “strongly” is putting it mildly.
Redfoo: “I’m sexy and I know it.” There, it’s done. Whether you’re a fan of the song or not, LMFAO’s chart-topping hit is now on infinite repeat in your head. It’s one of those typical, infectious beats that seems to worm its way into your mind, even after just reading the title. Well, YouTube sensation “Noah” is about to change that, for the better. Click through for his awesome cover.
A Norwegian man is in hospital with serious injuries after setting himself on fire yesterday. The incident took place outside the Oslo courthouse where Anders Behring Breivik is standing trial for mass murder and terrorism. N5FW video of the incident inside.
The 65th Cannes Film Festival officially begins today, and the South African delegation is making a pretty strong showing there. They’ve got 130 South African filmmakers attending, the largest SA delegation ever to go to Cannes, showcasing 12 feature films and eight documentaries – including Otelo Burning, by the guys who did Surfing Soweto.
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.
Over the past four decades, wildlife populations on Earth have declined by more than 30%, and some species by as much as 70%. The revealing data has prompted conservationists to label Earth as a “planet in crisis”.