The International Monetary Fund has another scandal to deal with, although this time it’s a financial one. A French court has today ordered an investigation into the new IMF head, Christine Lagarde, and her role in a much-criticised $400 million arbitration deal in favour of a controversial tycoon. It concerns the mishandled sale of sportswear maker, Adidas, in the 1990’s.
A newborn baby girl who doctors declared dead after being delivered was moments from her burial when she awoke and started crying at a Brazilian funeral home. She was immediately rushed back to the hospital placed in an intensive care unit, but sadly passed away for real shortly afterwards.
Speaking at the Black Hat hacker’s conference in Vegas yesterday, former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center Cofer Black voiced concerns about a future “code war” where hackers tamper with the technology that runs our day-to-day interactions. Then a fire alarm accidentally tripped, which was nice and thematic.
Recently 2oceansVibe told you about a certain duel that was going to happen live on YouTube, well kind of, between Isaiah Mustafa, the old Old Spice Guy, and Fabio Old Spices, the new Old Spice Guy. Isaiah defeated Fabio after some heated bathroom exchanges, but the real point of interest is that 22 million people have watched.
Police have confirmed that the device attached to terrified Australian schoolgirl Madeleine Pulver was not a bomb, just a tremendously elaborate hoax. The device, attached to the girl by a masked intruder in her parent’s home, “gave the appearance of a legitimate improvised explosive device.”
I was amused when I read that the article we published yesterday about Internet Explorer users having a lower average IQ than users of other browsers was a hoax. Not because I dislike IE users, but because this would have been the push they needed to, explore other browsers. Unfortunately though, sometimes global news agencies do get it wrong.
A 31-year-old Swedish man, known only as ‘Richard’, was attempting to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen and was arrested and had his experiment shut down after he contacted the Swedish Radiation Authority (Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten) to ask whether or not his pet project was legal.
Italy has become the next European country to join the wave of nations banning women from wearing veils that cover their faces in public. An Italian parliamentary commission has approved a draft law prohibiting women from wearing a burqa, niqab or any other garment that covers the face in public places.
This feels like it should have been news sooner, but it wasn’t. Which is why we’re going to talk about it now. Hege Dalen and wife Toril Hansen were one of several Norwegians who, on hearing gunshots and screaming coming from Utöyan Island, got into their boat and drove across the water to try and help.
GM’s Electric Networked-Vehicle (EN-V), the pod-shaped hands-free electric vehicle unveiled last year, is set for release soon. Confined to metropolitan areas, we should be able to live out our Jetsons inspired fantasies a little sooner than we’d planned, once GPS technology catches up a little.
A study, and a fairly quantitative one, is suggesting that the dinner conversation talk I think some of us may have had about the average Internet Explorer user may be true. AptiQuant offered free online IQ tests to over 100 000 people and then plotted the average IQ scores based on the browser on which the test was taken.
You’re going to want to watch this. OK Go have put out a new experimental music video for their new track, All Is Not Lost. You remember that one video with the treadmills? Or with the Rube Goldberg machine? Yeah, this is better than that.
An Iranian woman who was blinded by a man who threw acid in her face seven years ago prevented the Iranian government from literally taking “an eye for and eye”.
It’s time to dust off the old cheque book and keep an eye on what’s happening in Greece. You may just find something you want to purchase as Greek officials begin appointing advisers for the country’s ambitious privatisation drive, and what is one of the most ambitious asset-selling campaigns in modern history.
A clip of a distorted interview with a young black boy has raised questions about ethics in journalism in America. Responding to a news reporter’s question about what he’d like to be when he grows up, the boy replied: “I’m going to have me a gun! I’m going to be the police!” Guess which part of that sentence did not make it to TV?
Because robots can’t get depressed over awful working conditions and commit suicide, you see. Also we don’t have a robot union yet, so Foxconn (the guys who manufacture the iPhone and iPad) won’t need to worry about the slowly increasing factory worker wages in Taiwan, which are driving overhead costs upwards throughout the fancy-technology-making-industry.
See those tiny blocks? Each one of those is $100 million. Absolutely no spice. And that is what the United States’ debt will look like in $100 bills by Christmas this year. Click through to see the depressing, and amazing progression of how many $100 bills it takes to make a $15 trillion pile of […]
A California taxidermist has preserved Lady Gaga’s now-famous meat dress she wore at the 2010 MTV Music Awards. The dress is now on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
An unemployed man, 29, has become one of Britain’s youngest grandparents after his daughter gave birth at 14. Shem Davies and his former girlfriend Kelly John, 30, were “overjoyed” when their daughter Tia, who was born when her parents were 15, gave birth to little Gracie earlier this month. Tia’s boyfriend is 15.
Vodafone shut down their Egyptian network coverage during the revolution, arguably prolonging the event’s bloodshed and indirectly leading to the death of Egyptians who couldn’t summon ambulances when they were needed. This is bad. So it’s nice that AccessNow, a human rights NGO with Vodafone stock, are trying to force a company-wide human rights assessment.
What was obviously an awesome idea at the time, hasn’t ended up working out quite so well for two teenagers from Los Angeles. In the old days, one could probably get away with an old prank like this, but not with modern policing unfortunately.
A daily newspaper in Zimbabwe has revealed that Robert Mugabe has spent an excessive amount of money on foreign travel in the last six months, totalling $20 million. And we’re not talking Zimbabwean Dollars here, this is US currency. He has now reportedly surpassed his $15 million travel budget for the year, but that’s probably irrelevant to him.
The idea behind the game is pretty straight forward: you must beat your satellite navigational system’s estimated time of arrival. I’m quite sure this has crossed some of our minds a few times but apparently some seven million British drivers are actually partaking in the potentially lethal new craze.
Bigoted members of British society must be speedily wringing their hands and tensely furrowing their eyebrows in anger that this has happened. While not quite the same as the Name Your Hood campaign, Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Shariah law enforcement zones have been set up.
Today we received this harrowing report from San Francisco by a brave 2oceansViber. Before you continue, note that we indemnify ourselves from any angst or emotional complications that you may suffer as a result of reading the following letter.
Last week I told you a bit about Champagne’s history, and left you at around the 16th/17th century. I was going to try and take you all the way up to the present in this column. I then realised that this would not be possible in 100 words. So I shelved the pot-holed history of […]
The pictures you are about to see involve an accident caused by a person in Monte Carlo. This person collided a Bentley with a Mercedes, Ferrari, Porsche AND an Aston Martin – resulting in total damages of R7.6m.
Piers Morgan might have been speaking nonsense when he made the modest claim that all he knew of phone hacking was that someone once told him that it was possible. The embattled CNN host, who has spent a fair amount of time defending his knowledge on hacking lately, appears to have forgotten about a 2009 interview.
Speaking in New York yesterday, the former French finance minister and now new IMF head, Christine Lagarde, warned that despite the positive response in the financial markets to bailouts, fresh turmoil could easily boil over if debt crises aren’t properly managed now. She also really wants the Republicans and Democrats in Washington to stop squabbling so much.
Zebedia Mpofu allegedly had the audacity to tell a colleague at work that a soft drink and packet of biscuits he was having for lunch came courtesy of Zimbabwe’s economic policies under Robert Mugabe’s main rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. Thank goodness someone heard and reported this traitor, who now has to stand trail for insulting and/or undermining Mugabe.