Germany’s conservative leader Angela Merkel faced acute embarrassment on Tuesday night after aides admitted that she had plagiarised a speech used by Ronald Reagan in a 1980 United States presidential debate for her own television election duel with Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic chancellor.

Spaniards are the most prolific users of cocaine in the world, according to a report from state prosecutors obtained by El País newspaper on Tuesday. Spain has overtaken the United States and left Britain and Ireland behind, with the proportion of people who use the drug rising to more than one in 40.

Old habits die hard, especially in Egypt. When President Hosni Mubarak launched his election campaign, the party faithfully declared their support in traditional fashion. ”With our souls, with our blood, we will sacrifice for you,” they chanted, but the president was not pleased and asked them to stop.

United States President George Bush, facing a political crisis over the government’s handling of relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, announced on Tuesday that he would lead his own investigation of what went wrong. ”We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there’s a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack or another major storm,” he said.

Mussa Arafat, a military advisor to Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and a cousin of the late Yasser Arafat, was shot dead after a gunbattle at his home in Gaza City early on Tuesday. Arafat was shot in front of his wife and son before being dragged out onto the street.

I glanced at a certain Johannesburg newspaper recently, and saw that it has cheerfully started putting single-word names next to photographs of "celebrities". For instance, there’s a pic of Robert de Niro, and below it isn’t a caption saying why the pic is there. Instead, there is a bright, colourful word: "ROBERT!". Hmm, this is journalism for dummies only. Or did I miss a meeting?