God has finally come to United States reality television — and against all guesses the oddball match has delighted the Roman Catholic Church. God or the Girl pits four aspiring young Catholic priests against their libidos during the final four weeks before their decisions to take the church’s Holy Orders, with the vow of chastity.
Zimbabwe is ready to allow the return of white farmers who were driven off their farms under President Robert Mugabe’s land reform programme, the agriculture minister told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday. But minister Joseph Made denied that the new openness toward white farmers marked an about-face in land-reform policies that have been widely criticised as a failure.
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There was no doubt efforts were made to persuade Jacob Zuma’s rape accuser to drop the charge, the Johannesburg High Court heard on Wednesday. ”There is little doubt [KwaZulu-Natal finance minister Zweli] Mkhize tried to broker a settlement,” state prosecutor Charin de Beer told the court.
Former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni moved one step closer to a jail cell on Wednesday when two Pretoria High Court judges dismissed his application for leave to appeal against his sentence. The judges emphasised that Yengeni was a public official who had abused his position of trust for personal gain.
Iran will ignore any United Nations Security Council demands to halt its disputed nuclear programme, hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed on Wednesday. ”We won’t back down one iota on our lawful and inalienable rights,” the president was quoted as saying by the official news agency Irna.
Billboards dotting New Delhi are exhorting city residents to imagine a future made up of tall buildings and sky trains that will take the Indian capital from ”walled city to world city”. The phrase ”world-class city” is increasingly on the lips of city officials too, on a massive drive to tidy the capital in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010.
The council of the University of the Free State (UFS), which after eleven years of democracy still practises segregation in its student hostels, said the name change of a hostel for white men, named ”Verwoerd”, is a priority and will be finalised in June. The Mail & Guardian on February 17 reported that the university’s student hostels were still racially segregated.
The retail price of all grades of petrol will be increased by 39 cents per litre (c/l) on Wednesday May 3, the Department of Minerals and Energy said on Wednesday. The latest changes bring the retail price of a litre of 95-octane unleaded petrol in Gauteng to R6,12 a litre and to R5,88 a litre at the coast.
There is a ”turf war for human subjects” as pharmaceutical clinical trials increased 16 times in low-income settings such as Africa, the Microbicides 2006 conference in Cape Town heard on Wednesday. This is according to Professor Ames Dhai, head of Bioethics at the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School.
Ethiopia on Wednesday dismissed rebel threats to foreign energy firms considering work in the country’s restive south-east, saying the area was stable with no risk to potential investment. The information ministry said the warning from the Ogaden National Liberation Front that natural gas exploration in the Ogaden region ”will not be tolerated” was hollow and nothing new.