Public hearings for new broadcasters are being keenly watched by Zimbabweans desperate to be free of decades of the state broadcaster's tedium.

Four Zimbabwean journalists detained on Friday while covering the eviction of a police officer from a government lodging, have been released.

Zimbabwe's privately owned Daily News was back on the streets on Friday more than seven years after being shut down by the government.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer faces pressure to resign on Tuesday as well as questions about whether he will be prosecuted for any crime after a report linked him to a high-class prostitution ring. A New York Times report said the man who made his name fighting corruption hired a $1 000-an-hour sex worker

Alarmed by polls showing one in four Thai teens will celebrate Valentine's Day by having sex, police plan to swoop on motels, malls and parks to ensure youths behave themselves. The annual campaign to ensure good behaviour on February 14 will see city officials turn on all lights at public parks in the capital Bangkok.

Tanzanian newspapers welcomed on Friday the resignation of Prime Minister Edward Lowassa over a parliamentary probe into an emergency power generation contract. President Jakaya Kikwete accepted Lowassa's resignation and dissolved his Cabinet late on Thursday.

Publishers of a popular Zimbabwean daily, which was ordered to close more than four years ago, have been invited to apply for authorisation to begin publishing again, government-run media said on Friday. The Daily News was a virulent critic of President Robert Mugabe's government before being closed down in September 2003.

President Robert Mugabe's government has amended security and media laws that critics say have helped him entrench his rule. The changes to the Public Order and Security Act were agreed at talks, brokered by South African President Thabo Mbeki, between Mugabe's Zanu-PF party and two factions of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

Zimbabwe police on Friday brought in for questioning an editor and two executives from two leading independent media houses. Hama Saburi, editor of financial weekly the Financial Gazette, said he and the newspaper's chief executive were on their way to a police station for apparently violating government price controls.

Zimbabwean authorities are to consider an application by a daily newspaper to resume publication four years after it was banned. Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said the Media and Information Commission would consider an application by the Daily News and its sister paper the Daily News on Sunday.