It came as a pleasant surprise — perhaps not to Telkom’s T-Zone or Transtel’s Wireless G Wi-Fi businesses, but certainly to the rest of us — when the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa ruled last October that anyone may operate a Wi-Fi "hotspot" without a licence, provided it is limited to their premises. Are communications wires about to become a relic of a bygone era?
If all goes according to plan, and it rarely does when Mike Tyson is involved, the former baddest man on the planet will walk into a Phoenix gym sometime this week and begin hitting the speed bag. Or maybe he’ll walk into a Phoenix strip club and begin hitting on the dancers instead. He’s Mike Tyson, after all, so you never really know.
As the European Union prepares to open its new extension it might care to look at the cracks in the front wall. Countries across the eurozone are struggling with their public finances, high unemployment and voters who are unwilling to accept painful structural reforms of their social welfare networks and labour markets designed to make their economies more flexible.
”What if?” books are all the rage. Virtual historians tell us what would have happened if Hitler had won the Battle of Britain, or Kennedy had not been shot in Dallas. The latest contribution to this series surfaced in The Guardian recently, when Simon Heffer mused on the subject of ”what if” the IRA had murdered Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton bomb of 1984.
Every species seems to come and go. Some last longer than others, but nothing lasts forever. Humans are a relatively recent phenomenon, jumping out of trees and striding across the land around 200 000 years ago. Will we persist for many millions of years to come, or are we headed for an evolutionary makeover, or even extinction?
Beside the disaster in Iraq, the new Islamist terror campaign and the battle over immigration policy, the survival of the black-browed albatross may not look like the most pressing political issue. For many of those on the left, environmentalism is at a best a distraction, at worst a regression. The left must see that only environmentalism has the power to restrain global corporations, writes George Monbiot.
Former skipper Waqar Younis says his reverse swing is now considered an art form, but he and other Pakistani pace bowlers were accused of ball tampering when they introduced it in the early 1990s. ”They’ve now branded it as reverse swing, but we were slammed for it,” Younis told reporters on Monday as he announced his retirement from competitive cricket.
Nobody is thinking of quitting Leeds United as they struggle to retain their top-flight status, skipper Dominic Matteo has said before Tuesday night’s crunch match with Everton. The Yorkshire giants lie third from bottom of the Premier League and need to pull together like never before to ensure they do not drop to Division One next season.
White Zimbabwe Test cricketers have stated their position over the sacking of captain Heath Streak to the Zimbabwe Cricket Union in Harare. A letter explaining their attitude was collected earlier on Tuesday from the offices of lawyer Chris Venturas by the union’s chief executive, Vincent Hogg.
Australian opening batsman Matthew Hayden on Tuesday praised West Indies skipper Brian Lara for taking the world Test record score to a new level. In a 13-hour batting marathon against England on Antigua, Lara broke Hayden’s world-record individual Test score of 380 and went on to raise an unbeaten 400 .