Polish farmworkers who travelled to southern Italy were kept in a ”concentration camp” where they were fed on little more than bread and water, expected to labour in the fields for up to 15 hours a day and beaten by guards who called themselves kapos, it was revealed recently.

Cowering from the bombs in the Tyre Rest House Resort, the coastal city’s smartest hotel, along with 450 others, the Ahmad family had long since run out of food. Even if they made it to Beirut, the family of nine had no idea how they would pay for their flights to Denmark, where they have family and citizenship.

Peace talks between Somalia’s interim government and the Islamist militia in control of the capital and the southern regions of the country are due to begin in Sudan this weekend after an about-face by President Abdullahi Yusuf. Yusuf recently sent a delegation to the talks being held under the auspices of the Arab League.

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe is refusing to pay fees for his youngest son, Chatunga, insisting that the fees do not match the consumer price index. Recently, Minister of Education Aeneas Chigwedere wrote a letter to the privately run Hartman Primary School instructing it to cut this term’s school fees from about Z-million to Z-million.