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/ 15 February 2005

Gadget madness, history and porn*

"(* Just kidding about the porn. Although it does relate to a story demonstrating the power of using the word in an article heading.) In the meantime, police in Germany are irritated as hell at some happy pranksters who have been planting little United States flags in dog-poo piles for some time now. Piles of poo in parks and on sidewalks have been sprouting little flags, in a cheerfully anarchic form of political protest."

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/ 15 February 2005

Napster takes on Apple’s iPod

Digital media company Napster last week unveiled a portable subscription service that it claimed would ”change the music industry forever” and allow it to compete more effectively in its increasingly bitter battle with Apple’s market-leading iTunes. Napster To Go will give the company a significant point of difference from Apple, allowing subscribers to rent songs from its catalogue of 1,3-million tracks.

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/ 15 February 2005

Vodacom is not yet in the black

A report that Vodacom South Africa workers had submitted a proposal to buy the 5% stake that black economic empowerment company Hosken Consolidated Investments sold at the end of 2002 raises a number of issues. The workers’ desire may seem a bit optimistic. What the story, whatever its truth, raises once again is the lack of an empowerment holding in the largest cellular operator in South Africa.

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/ 15 February 2005

Abstraction from power confers power

”I speak to you not as an academic, but as a judge who holds public office as a member of the third arm of the government — which during the United States constitutional drafting process Thomas Jefferson famously described as ‘the least dangerous branch of government’,” writes Judge Edwin Cameron. Academics and judges exercise power through distance from power and through the honest critique of the exercise of authority.

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/ 14 February 2005

Ngcuka denies ‘contrived’ claim

Former national director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka denied on Monday having promised politician and convicted fraudster Tony Yengeni a maximum R5 000 fine in exchange for a guilty plea. ”This is a distorted version of the truth,” Ngcuka, now a businessman, said through spokesperson Sipho Ngwema.

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/ 14 February 2005

Abu Sayyaf claims Valentine’s Day bombings

The Abu Sayyaf, the Muslim militant group that claimed responsibility for a series of Valentine’s Day bombings in the Philippines, has been blamed for the country’s worst terrorist attacks. The group was founded in the early 1990s with seed money from Saudi-born September 11 terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.