There was seemingly no end to the measures the Spar Group took to rid itself of its biggest retail trading-group, the more than 40 Spar and Tops stores owned by the Giannacopoulos family.

Spar, a public company, has been involved in a nasty war of words and – as the Pietermaritzburg high court has now found – unscrupulous legal actions for several years aimed at closing down the Giannacopoulos family businesses that have long traded very successfully under the Spar brand name.  The feud came to a head in three cases that commenced in the Pietermaritzburg court in March.

After losing his cool when his fees were questioned.

When veteran Cape Town insolvency practitioner Eileen Fey ventured to suggest to attorney Leonard Katz of law firm ENS that his bill of R422,871.57 to defend a matter in the Wynberg Magistrates Court seemed “extremely high” and would he please draft a bill for taxation*, Katz went ballistic.

Beware: appearances can be deceptive.

Herold, a rural hamlet nestling in a valley at the top of the historical Montagu pass in the mountains above George is a picture of peace and tranquility. But, as the saying goes, the devil is in the detail.

A simple brick gate pillar at the entrance of the Franken Primary School has become the focus of a bitter contest between parents, teachers and the Herold community on the one side, and the local church minister and a property developer on the other.

They call it The Exterminator – South Africa’s Million Dollar Pigeon Race. Pigeon racing is a barbaric blood sport and a gambler’s dream, say British anti-cruelty activists in a damning media report critical of the sport’s long-standing royal patron, Queen Elizabeth.

Noseweek correspondent Jack Lundin discovers President Ramaphosa, a new recruit to the lofty game, is their next target.

So then, what else might the President be up to at his Limpopo game farm?

“Once upon a time in New York City, in the year 2020 to be precise, there lived a kind,
medicinally-managed depressive: a neurotic hypochondriac by day, a neurotic insomniac by night.

(Who’m I kidding? He was a hypochondriac at night too, often mostly at night.)”

Ronald Wohlman – ex South African copywriter, author and actor – never dreamt that his lockdown diaries, written on Facebook and followed by people all over the world – would become his “life’s work”.

“What am I writing here? Jesus, I didn’t go into this thinking this will become my opus. But I’m never going to be able to stop writing this diary, am I? It’s now my curse,” wrote Wohlman on Day 61 of his much read and much-loved lockdown journey.

From another country: Artificial Intelligence 1

This is an extract from a much longer article by Ross Andersen that appeared online in The Atlantic in July, about the international political implications of recent advances in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by the world’s competing superpowers.

Artificial Intelligence 2

As the technology advances and becomes less costly, bioacoustics is poised to become an important remote-sensing tool for conservation.

Mitch Aide, an ecologist based in Puerto Rico, thinks we should listen to the earth a lot more than we do now – and record and store its sounds on a massive scale.

Vodacom  still profiting from wasp fraud

When MyBroadband.co.za appeared on 26 July with a lead reporting that rogue WASPs have been allowed to steal (mostly FROM Vodacom subscribers) airtime unhindered for over a decade, the first thought that crossed our minds was that MyBroadband was plagiarising, wholesale, a story published in Noseweek 11 years ago!

In a recent BBC World News interview, former senior British judge, Lord Sumption, described the general response to the coronavirus pandemic as ‘collective hysteria.’ He went on to say that we appear to be ‘…working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.’

Why plug-in vehicles are not all they’re cracked up to be – and, likely, never will be.

A Scandinavian electric vehicle company is expected to showcase a prototype electric truck later this year. This “state-of-the-art” design will have a range of 160km and a top speed of 80km/h. Wow! That’s a similar performance to a battery-powered milk delivery truck of the 1960s.

In 2020, we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory; a time when information is available instantaneously in the palm of our hands, but we face great uncertainty as the novel coronavirus, SARS-COV-2 perplexes even the experts most qualified to understand it.

Before I go to sleep, I look at a picture of the Spanish Pyrenees. I imagine I am walking there, on the cobbled medieval paths in the footsteps of the Romans and the Templars. I do this because I want to doze off to snapshots of adventure and nature’s splendour. Below me lies an ancient beech forest, verdant; I hear the twitter of pilgrims gathering in the quaint granite taverns dotted along the route.