Kidnappers of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop found dead in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul had demanded a -million ransom, a senior police official said on Friday. Paulos Faraj Rahho, the archbishop of Mosul, 390km north of Baghdad, was abducted on February 29 after gunmen attacked his car and killed his driver and two guards.
Barack Obama faced potential damage to his campaign on Thursday after television networks aired footage of sermons by the former pastor of Obama’s church likening the Democratic frontrunner to Jesus and declaring: ”God damn America.”
Eskom is to begin with ”pre-emptive load-shedding” on March 31, chief executive Jacob Maroga said on Friday. These deliberate power failures would last no more than two hours and would take place between 6am and 10pm. ”The system remains tight,” he told reporters in Midrand.
Allegations of disorder on the main campus of the University of the Free State (UFS) contained in an anonymous email circulated country were untrue, Rector Frederick Fourie said on Thursday. The email apparently makes reference to incidents of intimidation by black students on the main campus in Bloemfontein on March 4.
The sex worker at the centre of the scandal that brought down the governor of New York state, Eliot Spitzer, has become the most sought after person in the United States, with camera crews camped outside her Manhattan apartment and her MySpace page inundated with traffic.
The Mineral and Petroleum Resources Royalty Bill initiated intense debate at its inception a few years ago. However, at the Mining Indaba in Cape Town recently Minister of Minerals and Energy Buyelwa Sonjica said significant progress has been made to date in consultation with stakeholders.
For two months Zuma has addressed the business world, Afrikaners, the Jewish community and farmers, as well as granting interviews to the international media, in an attempt to articulate what he stands for. Other African National Congress leaders must be appalled by his repeated bouts of foot-in-mouth disease.
While most of the country’s challenges — political uncertainty, a downturn in the economy and power failures — are manageable, crime has emerged as the one factor which consumers and businesses feel powerless to tackle. Anecdotal evidence suggests that violent house robberies are increasing.
A study conducted in Uganda and published this month in the <i>Lancet</i> has found that home-based ARV therapy provided by trained lay counsellors could be the best option for HIV-infected people living in remote, rural areas. Mortality dropped more than 90% among HIV-positive participants and their families receiving home-based care.
Even after the turbulence he encountered last week, Barack Obama still seems the probable Democratic nominee for one simple reason. By June 8, all 54 primaries and caucuses will be completed. And on that morning Obama will, unless something really weird happens, be ahead of Hillary Clinton in the count of pledged delegates.