In the skies above Gaza, an Israeli drone circles slowly overhead before its distant buzz is drowned out by the whistling of a missile. "You see, this is what our life has become," says Abdallah as he watches the missile explode nearby in a massive cloud of dust.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was accused on Tuesday of dragging his country’s already raucous general election campaign into the gutter when he declared that those who voted against him would be ”dickheads”. Speaking to journalists about the expected outcome of the election, Berlusconi said: ”I have too much respect for the Italians to think there are that many dickheads around who’d vote against their own interests.”
Iraq’s embattled prime minister has defiantly refused to give up his claim to head the country’s next government in spite of strong American and British pleas for an end to a deadlock which has paralysed the country for almost four months.
"This is war too," murmurs an ex-child soldier in southern Sudan, stone-faced and staring blankly at a placard reading: "Let all children go to school … Leave no child behind." A year after the end of two decades of fighting with regimes in Khartoum in a conflict that claimed 1,5-million lives and displaced four million people, south Sudan has declared war on illiteracy.
The child squirms drowsily as it struggles to roll over on the bunk bed, eventually succumbing to sleep. The skin on its face is too taught. Wisps of hair look as if they could fall out at any minute. "He is just from his daily ARVs [anti-retroviral drugs]," says the woman who takes care of him at an orphanage in the eastern Zimbabwean city of Mutare.
A British museum visitor was arrested on Wednesday despite claiming to have accidentally smashed three 17th-century Chinese porcelain vases after tripping over a shoelace, police said. Nick Flynn (42), from Fowlmere, southern England, was arrested at his home on suspicion of criminal damage.
”Your article, boldly titled ‘Ministries aim to trash green laws’ (March 17 2006), is highly inaccurate, misleading and downright wrong. Ironically, it bases its facts on an article that showed how our policies enhance the environment. In reading your article, I was as flabbergasted as the people who wrote letters [to your newspaper] last week,” writes Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu.
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Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi caused an uproar in Italy on Tuesday by blasting a particularly vulgar insult at left-wing voters. Addressing a meeting of shopkeepers in Rome, Berlusconi said: ”I have too high an esteem of Italians’ intelligence to believe that there are so many coglioni who may vote against their self-interest. I apologise for my coarse but effective language.”
Floods in Austria claimed their first victim on Tuesday as rising water in rivers caused a second dam to break, forcing many to evacuate their homes while emergency services worked to reinforce flood defences. An 18-month old boy was found dead on Tuesday afternoon after falling into the swollen Duerre Ager river while playing in front of his parents’ house.