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”.
News has just emerged that Former News Of The World editor, Rebekah Brooks, and her racehorse trainer husband Charlie Brooks, have been charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to the phone-hacking scandal.
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.
Patricia de Lille is about to fire off a proposal to award the Freedom of the City of Cape Town to Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. According to Cape Town’s mayor, the couple exuded leadership, excellence and inclusion, which made them “natural candidates for the city’s highest accolade.”
When Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, was asked if he’d want a hologram Freddie Mercury a la Tupac – he declined, saying “I don’t want to appear with a hologram of my dear friend.” Which is unfortunately ambiguous wording, because they’ve decided to conjure up a Mercury hologram at tonight’s 10th anniversary We Will Rock You musical.
Apple has been forced to drop the use of the term “4G” in its UK advertising for the new iPad, bacause not only is 4G not yet available to iPad users in the UK and Europe; it also appears that not all new iPads will be able to work on UK and European 4G when it does arrive. Is SA likely to suffer the same fate?
When Sir Martin Sorrell speaks about marketing trends, the global advertising and marketing fraternity takes note. The CEO of WPP, the world’s largest advertising and marketing services company, Sir Martin recently gave his view on the top ten trends facing marketers and ad agencies right now. South Africa falls within the region he referred to as the “Southern axis of opportunity” – a significant area of economic growth that cannot be ignored.