Could one of the inventors of the webcam transform the economics of computing for the poor? In 1991, when he was a doctoral student at Cambridge, Quentin StaffordFraser hooked up a camera to monitor the department’s coffeepot so his fellow workers would know when it was fresh.
Amid the top-level dialogue, public debate and opulent functions dedicated to solving the scourge of violence against women and children, is it possible that we are losing sight of the obvious? Could we be suffering from the "bullshit baffles brains" syndrome instead of allowing common sense and reason to prevail?
With the spectre of price controls on private hospitals looming, market leader Netcare has called for self-regulation by the industry to ward off moves by government to set prices. Netcare found itself in the eye of a storm recently amid accusations that it benefited from non-transparent pricing and for not passing on rebates from suppliers to its customers.
A week after the Kenyan Parliament passed a law compelling journalists to disclose their sources, pressure is mounting for President Mwai Kibaki to reject the punitive legislation. The new Kenya Media Bill, which was passed last week by 27 votes instead of the mandatory 30-member quorum, has come under heavy criticism from both the industry and the public, which perceive it as a deliberate attempt to gag the media, which has openly criticised the government for corruption.
It was bound to happen. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission might have promised enough reconciliation to facilitate the transition to democracy, but it hardly produced enough truth to bury the memory of apartheid in history. The public needs to discover the role of those who ran the apartheid state and who authorised the violence.
The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgement of a president. But it has also condemned the judgement of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country.
President Hugo Chávez has launched an intensive tour of South America to shore up Venezuela’s influence over the region and to loosen the grip of Western creditors. The socialist leader promised to buy up to -billion of Argentinian bonds and to help fund a -million gas plant, bolstering his reputation as a benefactor of Buenos Aires’s economic recovery.
Since the news of her firing on Wednesday night went public, many voices, including the ANC Women’s League in the Northern Cape, Cosatu, the SACP, the Treatment Action Campaign, Independent Democrat leader Patricia de Lillie, the DA and private individuals have come out supporting her, querying the motives for her dismissal.
Bit by bit, the tensions on the Korean peninsula are easing. This week it was announced that the leaders of north and south would meet for a two-day summit, the first in seven years, later this month. In July, the communist regime shut down its sole nuclear reactor and promised to make a full disclosure of its nuclear programme.
The Yangtze River dolphin has been declared officially extinct following an intensive survey of its natural habitat. The freshwater marine mammal is the first large vertebrate forced to extinction by human activity in 50 years, and only the fourth time an entire evolutionary line of mammals has vanished from the face of the Earth since the year 1500.