Iran’s interior minister has challenged a social taboo by urging the revival of the ancient Shia practice of temporary marriage to give young people easier legitimate access to sex. Moustafa Pourmohammadi, the minister, said the tradition, known as sigheh, should be promoted to offset a trend towards later marriage, which he said was depriving Iran’s youth of sexual fulfilment.
”Metro is killing me,” cries informal trader Lydia Masongo. The sole provider for her family of eight, Masongo says continued harassment by the Johannesburg Metro Police Department in the inner city is making it impossible for her to eke out a living on the streets. Since 1994, she has travelled from the East Rand every day to sell fruit and vegetables in De Villiers Street in downtown Jozi.
The first sight for anyone flying into India’s richest city is a sea of corrugated and tarpaulin-covered roofs beside a narrow, filth-choked river. It is an aerial view of Dharavi, considered Asia’s biggest shantytown, two square kilometres of open sewers, muddy lanes and ramshackle tenements that is home to almost a million people.
Do men love younger women? Well, do ducks take to water? There are many reasons why old sods like me find ourselves shamelessly looking at pretty young things and wishing age was on our side. Sometimes, as Mandla Mthembu has proved, with a bit of money we can turn the hands of time.
They are members of a hidden army who inhabit a curious in-between world. Tough, heavily-armed private security guards who love the adrenalin buzz of rubbing along with high-flying businesspeople and contractors. Blue collar workers trying to make a quick buck. This is the world of a foreign legion working, living, surviving, in what has become the most dangerous country in the world.
As expected, the Reserve Bank raised interest rates by 50 basis points on Thursday. This followed last week’s news that CPIX, the main measurement of consumer inflation, had breached the upper limit of the target band in April. CPIX (consumer inflation less mortgages) reached 6,3% year-on-year in April, the first time it has breached the bank’s 4% to 6% inflation target in 44 months.
The SABC has not officially confirmed whether or not it will screen Unauthorised: Thabo Mbeki, the documentary on the president that it had pulled off its schedule 13 months ago for being “incurably defamatory”. Ben Cashdan of Broad Daylight Films, the film’s producers, said the SABC had confirmed receipt of the master copy.
It was billed as the day they would bring the eight most powerful nations to their knees by sitting in the road, but by 9am the idealists, anticapitalists and anarchists had already been forced to take a hike. James Foley (22), a student from Glasgow, Scotland, had risen at 7.15am at the tent city in Rostock to join thousands of anti-G8 demonstrators marching on the luxurious Baltic spa resort of Heiligendamm, where world leaders were gathering.
When the Israeli leaders launched their expansionist war in June 1967 they never envisaged that 40 years later they would still be haunted by the consequences. At the time, they were driven by one strategic objective: to end the conflict by seizing all that remained of Palestine and complete the process of ethnic cleansing that started in 1948.
Five men have been arrested in connection with a burglary at Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Soweto home, Johannesburg police said on Monday morning. Superintendent Thembi Nkwashu said Tutu’s house in Orlando West was broken into on Sunday morning.