Sitting in the Hongyan restaurant, its vast three-storey marble facade rising above a busy street, Liu Shunyou stubbed out his cigarette.”I only started smoking to block out the smell of dead bodies all around the town,” he explained. As Sichuan’s devastated quake zone turns its attention to rebuilding, it should look north-east for inspiration.
Mozambique has received nearly 20Â 000 citizens fleeing South Africa, said Deputy Foreign Minister Henrique Banze, adding that the government there had set up three reception centres around the capital Maputo. He denied reports that the Mozambican government had declared a state of emergency.
A Japanese plumber was arrested for calling a toll-free number around 500 times so he could hear a taped female voice, police said on Monday. Hiroyuki Nomoto, a 38-year-old Tokyo resident, was arrested on suspicion of obstructing the business of the company, a food firm based in the city of Takasaki north of the capital.
The Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children runs a school for 275 non-hearing children, but the classrooms have been empty for almost six weeks because there isn’t enough fuel to bus the learners to school. Every day parents call the school in Gaza City to ask Suad when it will reopen.
The perennial question hanging over all talks in the Middle East is to decide whether they are a temporary sop to an intractable problem, or whether they herald major change. There are many reasons why the peace talks that Israel and Syria this week admitted they were holding could fail.
As the gruelling fuel crisis continues, so does the strain on local public transport services, including ambulances, across the Gaza Strip. Only about 15% of these services are operating, with up to 90% of private cars off the roads and all of Gaza’s 450 fuel stations closed.
The government should appoint a commission of inquiry to probe the xenophobic attacks that have claimed at least 50 lives and left thousands of people homeless, the United Democratic Movement (UDM) said on Sunday. UDM president Bantu Holomisa said there was a need for a transparent inquiry that would analyse the attacks and remove suspicions that they were ”deliberate and orchestrated”.
The Democratic Alliance on Sunday accused Parliament’s questions office of ”obstructing” the party’s parliamentary questions probing corruption. The questions office had disqualified two written questions on the grounds that they were too vague in terms of the National Assembly’s guide to procedure.
Egyptian authorities have arrested 13 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood around the country, a security official said on Sunday. Nine members of the banned group were arrested on Sunday in the Nile Delta town of Abu Hammad in Sharqiya province ”for trying to organise a speech at a mosque after prayers”, the official said.
It is a subject that has engaged some of the biggest names in international letters: Don DeLillo in Falling Man, Ian McEwan in Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Each attempted to explain in imaginary terms that great reordering of western life, which happened on 9/11 when New York’s Twin Towers were destroyed by al-Qaeda terrorists.