2oceans Vibe

The Robert Swan Voyage for Cleaner Energy yacht, 2041, is due to dock in Cape Town tomorrow at 16h00. The eco-friendly yacht is en-route to the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which takes place next month. Robert Swan, 2041’s founder, was the first person to walk to both the North and South Poles.

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.

2oceansViber, Rory Allen, spent four days last week documenting the Eihatsu Maru as it lay stranded on Clifton’s First Beach. He’s put together an amazing time lapse of events as they unfolded.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s taken long enough for Japanese officials to step up to the plate and offer South African Authorities their assurances that they will do everything they can to locate the stricken vessel’s owner. After a slight mishap overnight, Samsa confirmed to 2oceansVibe a little while ago that salvage experts were putting the finishing touches together for an operation at lunchtime today.

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.

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).

Tomorrow, SA Maritime Safety Authorities will make another attempt to remove the stranded Eihatsu Maru from Clifton’s First beach. Last night, 2oceansVibe spoke to one of the men in charge, Samsa’s chief operations officer, Sobantu Tilayi. Many questions still remain about the reasons why the captain grounded the vessel, but Tilayi said the operation has now reached a critical stage.

Earlier we reported that Rebekah Brooks, the ex-News of the World editor, and her husband, Charlie Brooks, had been charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Another four people have also been charged. Rebekah and her husband have come out fighting however, and have called the charges “weak and unjust”.

In February this year, Twitter unveiled a service that allows researchers, and anyone who has the money to pay for the service, to unlock the Twitter archives, as it were. They’ve expanded their product range again; and now you can get a weekly email summarising the most relevant tweets and stories distributed by the people on your timeline.

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.

Well, this is terribly embarrassing: JPMorgan, the largest bank in the US, literally wiped seven per cent off their stock in a few hours with this blunder. The investment bank has blamed “sloppiness and bad judgment” for the enormous error.

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.