Thursday, July 10, 2025

Hong Kong Securities Exchange Hacked, Partly Suspends Trading

Not even security exchanges are immune to hackers these days. Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, the world’s biggest security exchange operator by market value, suspended trading yesterday for companies including HSBC. This came after its website was hacked in what’s been described as a hack with malicious intent at a critical time.

One Of SA’s Most Wanted Criminals Walks Out Of Court, Unnoticed

Bongani Moyo, standing trial for more than 35 bank robberies, escaped from the Pretoria Regional Court yesterday. He found a pair of crutches and simply walked out the front door – along with the rest of the public. But how did he escape from his cell to begin with? No one locked it.

Meet Virgin Galactic’s First Astronaut

Dave MacKay, 53-year-old British pilot, will be the first captain of Virgin Galactic‘s commercial space fleet, taking up the role first with the maiden voyage of SpaceShipTwo, scheduled for 2013. MacKay has over 30 years of regular flying experience, but like pretty much everybody, he’s wanted to fly spaceships since he was a kid.

Mom Defends Provocative Vogue Photos of Pre-Teen Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau

The mother of 10-year-old Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau is ok with the photo shoot which appeared in this month’s issue of French Vogue, depicting her pre-teen in some rather adult poses. It seems Veronika Loubry, a fashion designer, is more concerned with the materialism of the spread than its supposedly sexualised images of young Thylane.

Flash Mob Wedding Proposal In Sandton City [VIDEO]

More often than not these kind of feel-good stories seem to emanate from other parts of the world. Not this one however. This one is proudly South African and happened in Sandton City this past Saturday when a man cleverly orchestrated a flash mob to intercept his bride-to-be for a romantic proposal opportunity.

London Rioter FAILS Trying To Throw An Umbrella [VIDEO]

Angry youths are taking over the streets of London. But rioting is a profession rather best left to the professionals. The guy featured in this video hopefully learned a valuable lesson: if you can’t even throw an umbrella properly at the bobbies then you should rather go back to being on the dole. Because that move was well embarrassing, innit?

Crowdsourcing London’s Riot Clean-Up

There is something encouraging coming out of the past three days of rioting and looting, even if it is a remote silver lining: the online mobilization of volunteer clean-up operations, mostly organized via Twitter and Facebook. By this time yesterday, #riotcleanup, was the second-highest trending topic worldwide.

‘Amy House’ – Brazil’s Drug Ambassador

So it looks like Brazil is at the forefront of drugvertising, and Amy is there number one brand ambassador. Apparently a gang has been using her likeness to market baggies of coke, inserting her picture inside and dubbing her as ‘Amy House’. Guess who they were putting in their bags of crack? Osama Bin-Laden.

South Africa Is The Strike Capital Of The World

Nice one, guys! South Africa has the highest rate of strikes in the world, a labour analyst said yesterday. We’ve had 1 000 working days per 1 000 workers lost in 2010 – and it is expected to be even worse at the end of this year.

German Nationalist Punked By ‘Trojan T-Shirt’

Souveneir t-shirts handed out at a rock festival in Gera, eastern Germany, were decorated with skulls, right-wing flags and the words “hardcore rebels,” to appeal to the vaguely neo-Nazi crowd the festival attracts. Except when the shirts got washed, the douchey decorations faded, replaced with anti-extremist slogans.

Album Review: Frank Sinatra – Best Of Vegas

Sinatra. Ol’ Blue Eyes. The Chairman of the Board. It’s hard to know where to start with Frank Sinatra. There’s the young Frank of the 1940’s, the Oscar winning movie star, The Rat Pack years, with his old pals Sammy Davis, Dean Martin and the boys. Then there’s the manic depression, the equal rights activist […]

The Best Travel Video You Will EVER See [VIDEO]

Rick Mereki and two of his friends traveled the world in 44 days. Their trip included 11 countries, 63 000 km covered, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage featuring Rick walking! They took 1 second clips from all the locations visited, and compiled it into this must see video. It is nothing short of brilliant.

“Swallowable Parfum” Makes Your Skin Emit Perfume

Australian artist and ‘body architect’ Lucy McRae, in collaboration with Harvard biologist Sheref Mansy, is releasing these little digestible capsules that make human skin emit perfume scents. Which is nice and futuristic, I think. And by futuristic I mean I have no idea how this thing works.

Upmarket Nudist Resort To Open In The Cape

I’m quite sure this new resort won’t pull the usual folk that hang out in Sandy Bay. They have their vibe. This resort will have its vibe. Anyway, a report in the Weekend Argus has said that so far, Somerset West residents (where the resort will be situated) have expressed mixed reactions, but a summer 2011 opening is definitely on.

Zimbabwe Torture Camp Exposed

“There was a lot of screaming.” The BBC is reporting that Zimbabwean police and military are recruiting civilians to illegally dig for diamonds for them. The report also mention a torture camp, run by Zimbabwe’s security forces, operating in the country’s rich Marange diamond fields.

Banksy Does Some Rupert Murdoch Art

Banksy’s put up some new art on his site because all the other well-known people were speaking out about the NewsCorp. hacking scandal, and Banksy didn’t want to be left behind. Which is nice! Because honestly I’d almost forgotten about Murdoch. Way to be relevant, Banksy.

Google Has First Self-Drive Car Accident – Who’s Responsible?

When I first heard about Google’s self-driving cars I was excited. Google weren’t the first to experiment with this kind of thing, and technology is evolving, but deep down I always knew it would be hard to trump KITT from Knight Rider or DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. Prius on Prius car love after the jump.

Rowan Atkinson Crashes His McLaren F1, Again [PICS]

The British actor more commonly known as Mr Bean has crashed his purple McLaren F1. The R7.5 million supercar spun several times, smashed into a tree and ploughed into a road sign before catching fire on the opposite side of the road. This isn’t the first time he’s had an incident while driving his purple passion either.

Blink-182 Rewards Fans For Pirating Their Music [VIDEO]

Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on when it comes to pirating music, you have to respect the guys from Blink-182. For their latest single, they used several unauthorized fan clips that appeared on YouTube to make a music video for their latest single.

It’s All Going A Bit Hybrid

I think it’s incredibly easy to forget that we are living through one of the great technological revolutions in human history. And the car is of course well and truly part of that revolution. Yesterday I sampled what might be one of the most advanced cars on the road today, and to be honest, I’m not sold.

Radvertising: Stop-Motion Film Made With 350 000 Post-It Notes

Melissa, a Brazilian footwear brand, is doing it right. They created this giant time-lapse video on the side of a building in SãoPaolo using Post-it notes as analog pixels. I’m not totally clear on why this would make me want to buy shoes, but whatever it looks amazing.

South Africa Suffers Child Labour Scourge

South Africa has a very real child labour problem. Did you know that? And particularly in the North West province, Cosatu said today. This follows a shocking incident in June where an underage boy named Molefe Mogale lost his hand while operating a machine on the farm where he was employed in Rustenburg. He’s14 years old – and now he only has one hand.

NASA Launches Spacecraft To Jupiter

Just when we thought NASA was going to take a backseat and let privatisation take the wheel for a while, they squeeze out yet another project. It just happens to be one of the space agency’s most ambitious missions too, and will attempt to discover the secrets behind the largest planet in the solar system – Jupiter.

It’s Snowing On Table Mountain (No Spice)

“Boom.” Of course, there can only be one reason for this unusual meteorological blessing: The TBG is on the Mountain. Coincidence? I think not. Come on. Don’t be silly. [Headline image source:tablemountain]

The La Fee Absinthe-Minded Moment Of The Week

We all have our lapses of judgment. But some of us make such horrendously poor decisions that one simply has to ask, “What were they on?”. Every week we bring you three contenders in what can only be described as a battle of small wits. So, with great pleasure we present this week’s three La […]