Moves are afoot for South Africa’s capital city to be renamed Tshwane, the Tshwane metro council confirmed on Friday. ”Pretoria is a suburb within Tshwane …. the city centre is Pretoria … the city is Tshwane,” said spokesperson Console Tleane. This lands in the middle of debate over the legal status of the name ”Tshwane”.
German workaholics may be suffering from a lack of sex, according to a university study published on Friday. A survey of 32 000 men and women by researchers at the University of Goettingen found over 35% of those reporting unsatisfying sex lives tended to use hard work as a diversion.
There have been ”significant breakthroughs” in several police investigations into organised crime, the Safety and Security Ministry said on Friday. The latest was the arrest of 13 members of a gang suspected of carrying out a spate of cash-in-transit heists in the Eastern Cape, it said in a statement following Thursday’s meeting of the Anti-Crime Leadership Forum.
The name ”Pretoria” will be changed to ”Tshwane” on all route and direction signs across South Africa, the Tshwane metro council said on Friday. Communication and marketing head Console Tleane confirmed that media reports about the name change were true.
As fuel shortages continued countrywide and panic buying set in, the Department of Minerals and Energy insisted on Friday it would not intervene in the strike by fuel workers. ”It is a huge problem and we are not happy with it, but our hands are tied. It is a very tough one … it is an in-house issue,” said spokesperson Sputnik Rantau.
Percy Zvomuya reviews the 2007 EU Literary Award winner, Coconut by Kopano Matlwa (Jacana).
His office is in a dark and musty basement, the shelves laden with religious and legal texts and boxes of files. Two white shirts are slung over hangers in the corner and Yoelish Krausz is sitting at his desk. Here he works as the operations officer of his deeply religious, ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, the Neturei Karta.
Almost 20-million people have been displaced or stranded and more than 250 killed by flooding across India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Hundreds of kilometres of land stretching from the Gangetic plains to the Bangladeshi delta are under water after rivers burst their banks.
Iran’s reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, has suffered a blow to his political standing by being pictured apparently shaking hands with women in breach of Islamic convention. The image triggered outrage among fundamentalists after being posted on conservative websites and YouTube.
Nasa on Saturday is to launch space probe Phoenix on a nine-month journey to Mars’ arctic region, where it will dig through ice for clues to past or present microbial life on the red planet. The Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled for blast-off from Cape Canaveral on August 4, with a first attempt at 9.36am GMT.