The UN chief confronted Sudan’s president on Monday with demands to allow the return of aid groups to Darfur — and was met with a defiant response.
In The Da Vinci Code, the Holy Grail is neither an object nor an objective. It symbolises an earthshaking secret: Mary Magdalene bore a child with Jesus. The mega-selling book — the film version of which opens next week — is fiction. But, as far as Grail legends go, it’s in good company. The only undeniable truth about the Grail is that there’s no shortage of tales about it.
A Vatican study on whether it could permit condoms to battle HIV/Aids has a very narrow scope: married Roman Catholic couples in which one partner has the virus. But its theological underpinnings are centuries old, and could lay the groundwork for an end to the church’s blanket ban on contraception.
If she runs away from her life of prostitution, her parents will become sick and die. At least that’s what this Nigerian woman believes. The threatened curse, she claims, is part of a voodoo rite performed in her homeland just weeks before she was brought to Greece by a prostitution ring.
Iraqi Kurds’ dreams for a post-Saddam Iraq include doubling their share of oil revenues, the speaker of the regional parliament said on Monday.