You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Bleary-eyed readers of the <i>Mail & Guardian Online</i> on Tuesday April 1 could be forgiven for falling for Eskom’s bold new "sector-sharing plan" to save electricity. We round up some of the day’s best pranks.
Football folk make the kind of throwaway remarks that would be alarming coming from anyone else. ”Some people think football is a matter of life and death,” Bill Shankly, the late Liverpool coach, once said. ”I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”
The accountancy firm that looks after children’s entertainers the Wiggles is not an obvious place to search for the Holy Grail, but that’s where the trail led on Tuesday night. It started with a simple quest — what on earth is a large advertisment headlined ”The Ancient & Noble Order of The Knights Templar” doing in the Daily Telegraph?
Northern Ireland’s largest Protestant party scrambled on Wednesday to secure a seamless transfer of power after its firebrand leader, Ian Paisley, announced his departure, drawing tributes from all sides. Paisley said on Tuesday he would step down as Democratic Unionist Party head in May.
The Vatican has called on Catholics to atone for the sex abuse scandals that have engulfed their church in recent years by taking part in what may be the largest global prayer initiative ever seen. Cardinal Cláudio Hummes said that every diocese in the world should name a priest to work full-time on the arrangements for the ”perpetual adoration” of the eucharist.
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/ 26 December 2007
A man in a clerical habit abused me in the church hall of the Johannesburg parish of the Immaculate Conception in Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank. It happened after a children’s Christmas party — and my abuser was a Catholic cleric. My uncle, Cardinal Owen McCann, was the archbishop of Cape Town at the time. His position as president of the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference was not enough to deter my abuser.
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/ 25 December 2007
Christians around the world celebrated Christmas on Tuesday as the Catholic leader in the Holy Land pleaded for peace in the Middle East and Pope Benedict XVI spoke against selfishness. Iraqi Christians meanwhile celebrated a fearful Christmas in the shadow of suicide bombings and sectarian violence.
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/ 21 December 2007
Protesters, unfazed by violent clashes with police hours earlier, on Friday vowed to continue their battle against a plan to demolish 218 public housing buildings in New Orleans, a bid that has further highlighted the growing tensions in a city struggling to recover two years after Hurricane Katrina.
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/ 30 November 2007
Philippine authorities launched a manhunt on Friday for more suspects accused of helping stage a dramatic but short-lived rebellion against the government, which was put down by the military. The small band of primarily armed-forces officers, who seized a luxury hotel on Thursday, were bundled off by police after a lightning raid.
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/ 29 November 2007
Fierce firefights broke out inside a five-star hotel in the Philippines capital on Thursday as government forces entered to arrest a group of military rebels, a reporter on the scene said. An armoured troop vehicle rammed repeatedly into the main door of the hotel and roared into the lobby amid a hail of gunfire.
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/ 29 November 2007
President Hugo Chávez is encountering unexpectedly strong opposition to a referendum on constitutional reform which would cement his rule in Venezuela, with violent clashes between rival demonstrations and security forces feeding a mood that the country is at a turning point.
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/ 19 November 2007
Hollywood is to fill in the Bible’s ”missing years” with a story about Jesus as a wandering mystic who travelled across India, living in Buddhist monasteries and speaking out against the iniquities of the country’s caste system. Film producers have delved deep into revisionist scholarship to piece together what they say was Jesus’s life between the ages of 13 and 30.
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/ 17 November 2007
In the first big-screen casualty of the Hollywood writers strike, Columbia Pictures said on Friday it had postponed production on Angels & Demons, a prequel to its box-office hit The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks. The Sony-owned film distributor said the planned release date for the thriller has been pushed back to 2009.
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/ 5 November 2007
Last week Kenya’s newly selected cardinal — and for reasons that are obscure to me, we have not had one in a while — came out to declare that the Catholic Church opposes majimboism. To its supporters, majimboism is a kind of federalism; to its detractors it looks a lot like ethnic regionalism.
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/ 13 October 2007
Yes, said Claudio Amicucci, some of the other fans were having some difficulty coming to grips with the idea. ”It’s such a big and original project.” Amicucci had turned up early to watch his team, AC Ancona, play their first game since learning that they were in effect being taken over by the Roman Catholic Church.
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/ 27 September 2007
Mozambique’s Roman Catholic archbishop has accused European condom manufacturers of deliberately infecting their products with HIV ”in order to finish quickly the African people”. The archbishop of Maputo, Francisco Chimoio, told the BBC that he had specific information about a plot to kill off Africans.
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/ 16 September 2007
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is consolidating his hold on power as he ruthlessly tackles his arch-critics ahead of 2008 polls in which he is a candidate, analysts say. His latest victim is former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, one of his strongest critics, who resigned this week from his post in the aftermath of an alleged adultery scandal.
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/ 11 September 2007
Archbishop Pius Ncube, a leading critic of President Robert Mugabe, resigned on Tuesday after an adultery scandal but said he would not be silenced by the ”wicked regime”. Ncube stood down as archbishop of Bulawayo after state media in July published photographs of him in bed with a married woman.
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/ 4 September 2007
Hurricane Felix slammed into Nicaragua’s Miskito Coast as a record-setting category-five monster storm on Tuesday, whipping metal rooftops through the air like razors and forcing thousands to flee. Meanwhile, off Mexico’s Pacific coast, Hurricane Henriette bore down on upscale resort Cabo San Lucas.
Sun City’s second Positive bash is a layer cake of art and entertainment celebrating survival, writes Matthew Krouse