Hackers use a great variety of techniques to break into private computer systems. John Graham-Cumming reports In a frenzy of announcements over the past few weeks, Nasa, the Pentagon, the United States Navy and a number of universities revealed that their computers were under cyber-attack. Many of the attacks relied on tried and tested hacking […]
Deborah Toler: A SECOND LOOK When Theodore Roosevelt visited sub-Saharan Africa in 1909, after he had already stepped down as United States president, he took an elephant gun and a team of taxidermists and brought home 512 animal specimens for the Smithsonian Institute. When President Bill Clinton – the first USpresident to visit this region […]
Chris Gordon and Ann Eveleth Zambia sent 500 troops to its border with Angola on Monday following persistent allegations that arms to Unita are being ferried across it. After months of denial that the border was porous, the Zambian government this week finally agreed to take action. The agreement, announced by Zambian foreign minister Keli […]
Martin Kettle in Washington The city of Louisville in Kentucky boasts possibly the world’s only statue of Louis XVI of France – in honour of the man from whom it takes its name. It is doubly odd to find a statue of the last of the Bourbons in the middle of a mid-western state becau […]
The Time of the Writer festival was recently held at Natal University. South African author Farida Karodia was there Monday In the afternoon Nigeria’s Nobel winner Wole Soyinka, British author Barbara Trapido, Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera and Breyten Breytenbach, there since Sunday, drift into the lounge. Some of the writers on the programme have not turned […]
I find myself sitting next to Mike Atherton as the England cricket team crowds on to a small plane leaving Guyana for the next Test in Barbados. He is reading the memoirs of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from Chile. Atherton is also impressively familiar with Guyanese literature and mentions the recent death of […]
Tracy Murinik: On show in Cape Town Like the variegations of a leaf skeleton, or a highly convoluted, contoured mapping of space, Paul Edmunds’s assemblages inveigle themselves along the foundations of the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet in an installation entitled Once Again. Hundreds of small plastic cable ties and bottle tops, all meticulously joined […]
Adam HauptOn stage in Cape Town The nightlife in central Cape Town is vibrant, and a casual observer watching the cars cruising and the dudes boozing might easily think that the multicultural beast that is South Africa is perfectly represented here. But this is a misapprehension. The m ore pretentious forms of cultural expression still […]
fallout from Vryburg Bongani Siqoko The ongoing racial clashes at Vryburg High School in North West province have put a strain on many Afrikaans schools around the country – some of them battling to overcome the perception that they are all racist. The principal of Elandspoort High School in Pretoria, Sarel du Toit, said Afrikaans […]
Charl Blignaut: On stage in Johannesburg It is no doubt extremely uncool of me to not to gush about Ben Elton’s Popcorn. I mean, I ask you, how can a ”Generation-X West End smash hit” that uses terms like ”Tarantino-esque” in its publicity material possibly be anything but deadly hip? Actually, the answer is simple; […]