THERE is something delightfully South African about the latest privacy panic over AirPods: apparently, the technology has become so dangerously sophisticated that you may soon need permission to hear what is being said in the room you are standing...
Whose Gaza framing is it? Hunter’s own DeBrief footage complicates the Rodney Plett story she’s telling
RODNEY Plett's statement today settles what happened outside a Norwood synagogue on Yom Kippur: he swore at Abdur Rahamaan Aziz and made remarks invoking Israel and Muslims that he now calls "hurtful and wrong." That much, the footage and statement agree on. What's being built on top of that admi...
Court Draws a Line Between Protest and Defamation in Cape Union Mart Case
THE Western Cape High Court has handed down a judgment that will likely reshape how activist campaigns in South Africa frame allegations against corporate targets — even as it stops well short of settling the underlying political dispute that sparked it. Judge Cloete's ruling, delivered on 4 Sept...
Lorgat and the ‘firehose of falsehood’
IN 2011 Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini coined what would become known as Brandolini's law, or the asymmetry principle. He contrasted the considerable effort of debunking misinformation with the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states: "The amount of energy needed...
Mandela Made Room for Zionists. His Admirers Don’t
NELSON MANDELA’S most-quoted line on Palestine travels the world redacted and stripped of company: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” It appears on murals and banners as though it were the whole of his position. It was delivered on 4 Decembe...
Allegations of Mendelsohn SLAPP case stretch credulity
A PIECE by Hassan Lorgat published by IOL mischaracterises two cases involving UCT professor Adam Mendelsohn. In the first instance, he takes issue with Tali Feinberg's article in Jewish Report on Mendelsohn v Choritz, in the second he condones Megan Choritz's crude criticism of the Mendelsohn le...