I believe it’s safe to say that animal poaching has now gotten completely out of hand. This is a scene I’d rather not try and picture – a herd of 22 elephants, were swooped on by a helicopter, and massacred.
So! Disney likes your money, and likes for you to dedicate that money to it in advance – which is why they’ve unveiled their animated movie lineup for 2013 to 2015, shedding some light on what will fill the release dates they’d previously reserved for new Pixar flicks. Because those guys take forever to make.
A new startup called Urthecast is in the process of putting together HD cameras to be fitted to the International Space Station, so that people can watch real-time video of the planet from space. Which is at once really cool, and sort of pointless. The footage is looking impressive, though – take a look.
Remember the auction of Khulubuse Zuma’s possessions we covered on Monday? Well, it appears Khulubuse Zuma has some more cars that the Sheriff of Verulam missed. Fifteen to be exact, hidden at a house owned by one of Zuma’s associates. We’ve got the details on the hidden luxury wheels, not to mention some more of Sarah Britten’s thoughts on the matter, after the jump!
Hey there, people who like free online storage. As expected, Google’s potential Dropbox-killer, Google Drive, has gone live – offering users 5GB of free online storage, with the potential to upgrade to 25GB for $2,50 per month. The service is available on PCs, Macs, Android phones – and is coming soon to iOS.
In the wake of the tragic death of 20-year old Capetonian bodyboarder, David Lillienfeld last Thursday, the City of Cape Town has agreed to implement a shark spotting programme at Kogel Bay, where the young man lost his life.
Of all the companies you’d expect something like this from, IKEA is probably at the top of the list. The company revealed this nifty looking device in a press pack recently. Hipsters the world over just busted a semi.
Forbes.com released a list of Africa’s 20 most powerful business people yesterday (they do like a list over there at Forbes) and it wasn’t too hard to pick up a trend on the list of the continent’s commercial high flyers – no less than 12 of them are South African. Are we awesome, or what? We’ve got the full list, including our Mzansi business powerhouses, after the jump!
SABC Radio and The New Age newspaper have reported that Julius Malema’s expulsion from the ANC has been upheld. As from today, 24 April 2012, Julius Malema is no longer a card-carrying member of the ANC, and holds no office in the party, or any of it’s organs.
It’s Mount-Everest-climbing season, apparently – with the National Geographic team attempting to recreate the route used in the first American ascent of the mountain, the 1963 NG-sponsored American Mount Everest Expedition. The team is live-updating their progress online, with a live stream of photos, blog posts, and twitter updates. I think one of them’s using Instagram, too.
The South African Post Office is celebrating the 18th anniversary of our transition to democracy this Friday with a set of eight gorgeous new stamps designed by Lize Marié Dreyer, a third-year student at the Open Window School of Visual Communication in Gauteng. We’ve got the full set of these philatelic fancies, after the jump!
Downed mining magnate and Presidential nephew, Khulubuse Zuma’s belongings are on auction in Verulam, KZN. We’re following Sarah Britten (@anatinus) on Twitter to get the low down on the high price of Zuma’s luxury living. All our favourite tweets and pics, courtesy of Ms. Britten, after the jump!
This weekend, Indian authorities announced that they planned to establish Assam tea as the national drink, celebrating the life and work of the man who introduced tea farming to Assam state, and also died trying to boot the British out. More of this hot cup of history, after the jump!
Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel – among other companies – have been accused of restricting salary increases and restricting career development by agreeing not to poach each other’s staff; California District Judge Lucy Koh has found that there’s enough evidence to support trial for antitrust injury. Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm are also involved.
Oscar, one of the world’s most famous adopted dogs, and his owner, Joanne Lefson is currently in in Cape Town. They are championing the cause of dog adoption – with a giant dog hot-air balloon floating over the Mother City this morning. See pics inside.
And you people wonder why they tried to switch the internet off. Khosrow Zarefarid, an Iranian software manager, warned Iran’s banks’ CEOs of a security flaw in the banking system. When nobody responded, Khosrow hacked 3 million accounts across 22 banks, then dropped these details — including card numbers and PINs — on his blog.
Signs suggest that Facebook is looking to have its initial public offering launch on on May 17th, assuming that the Securities & Exchange commission rubber-stamps all of the social network’s paperwork – including documents concerning Facebook’s recent billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram. Facebook is set to be initially valued at around $100 billion.
Oscar Pistorius has been named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2012. He is the only South African on the list. See who he shares it with, and what the magazine had to say about him, after the jump.
Mitch Hurwitz, Arrested Development creator, has revealed that the long-mourned show will be premiering it’s 10-episode fourth season in one huge lump on Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature in 2013. You’ve got a year to come up with a plausible excuse to spend a day off from work to watch the entire season.
Spain’s King Juan Carlos finally issued an apology this morning for the hunting trip he took to Africa recently where he shot live game on a private reserve in Botswana, including elephants. The scandal might never have come to light if he hadn’t had an accident during the trip and had to be taken back to Spain for emergency hip surgery.
Yesterday NASA managed to capture the clearest-yet footage of a solar flare in process after magnetic fields on the Sun’s northeastern curve exploded in huge streams of plasma and sun stuff. The footage only accounts for about five seconds of explosion, but it’s very, very cool, both in and out of time-lapse.
It’s hard to find a success story in the spiralling shit storm that is practically everything to do with the SABC these days, but SABC3 have bucked the trend a little, reaching into TV history for a programme that is turning their ratings nosedive around – and you’ll never guess who it is!
UC San Diego physicist, Dmitri Krioukov got ticketed recently for running a stop sign – which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is the fact that, rather than pay the $400 fine and move on, Krioukov wrote a mathematical paper proving that the cop who ticketed him had a “perception of reality that did not properly reflect reality.”
Yesterday we told you about SA yacht, The Dandelion, which had been missing at sea for days since her departure from northern Mozambique. Local and foreign authorities feared the vessel and its seven multi-national passengers had been captured by pirates in the Indian Ocean. 2oceansvibe has just received word – from the South African skipper, John Sergel himself – that the Dandelion has returned safely, and why she was held up. Click through to read.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s controversial new talk show is set to drop today at 13h30 South African time on a Russian digital news channel. Nothing this man does is not bent on overthrowing the way we look at our society and the world around us, so the first episode of The World Tomorrow should be a hefty serving of global illuminati conspiracy cray-cray realness. Check out Episode One, after the jump!
25-year-old South African serviceman, Private Jaco van Gass, lost his left arm to a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan three years ago. Now he’s testing a prosthetic ice-axe – an invention of his own design – in preparation for an attempt at Mount Everest in May, alongside five other injured servicemen.
Google’s long-anticipated cloud storage service, Google Drive, is set to launch some time next week – in yet another attempt to move in on a service that other companies have been occupying for years. What’s interesting here is that Google is planning on starting everyone with 5GB of free storage, easily trumping Dropbox’s 2GB base quota.
Seismic instability continues on the Pacific Rim this week with a magnitude 7 earthquake recorded off the coast of Papua New Guinea early this morning (just after 05h00 Australian Eastern Standard Time). The tremor struck at a depth of 202km and was centred 137km north of Lae, Papua New Guinea’s second-largest city.
FNB have announced they will start offering the new iPad to their customers at the end of this month, the first South African company to make the new iPad available domestically. More details on the South African launch after the jump!
South Africa’s transition to full digital terrestrial broadcasting is one of those processes that one measures in aeons, like the lifespan of stars or the inexorable evolution of monkey-fish-frogs into homo sapiens. The Ministry of Communications released the latest twist in this lengthy tale this morning, so get your R700 Set Top Box fee ready while we explore Dina’s latest digital daydream, after the jump!