Putri and her friend Anif have been inseparable since the earthquake. Each day, the little girls come to the giant white tent, grab a handful of crayons and set to work. Five-year-old Putri sketches a mountain with gray smoke snaking from its peak. ”Merapi”, she says, referring to the increasingly active volcano nearby.
The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From dawn to dusk we read about it, heard about it and saw it: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain. But the Moroccan Wall, which for 20 years has perpetuated Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara, goes unmentioned altogether.
Someone once said: ”Those who can, do and those who can’t, teach.” I suppose that might depict the majority of us currently in the profession as no-hopers and failures. However, this is hardly the case as the demands on a teacher today are simply enormous and stressful. As our communities have changed and adjusted under the pressures of the modern world, so too have our children and their families. Teaching, today, is not for the faint-hearted.
Flawed emergency planning and communications breakdowns marred the response to last July’s London transit bombings, says an official report published on Monday. The London Assembly’s report highlights both the heroism and the confusion of emergency crews responding to the bombs, which killed 52 commuters and four bombers.
Joseph Kabila, the interim president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has shot himself in the foot with the coup-plot fiasco he engineered two weeks ago. Internationally he has infuriated two of his principal backers — South Africa and the United States — by unjustifiably holding 22 of their nationals for 10 days.
Uriah Maleka (83), a founder member of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) and former representative of the African National Congress in Angola, has died after suffering a mild stroke. Maleka’s son Tito confirmed that his father died on Saturday morning at the South Rand clinic in Johannesburg.
South African businessman and political activist Eric Molobi has died aged 58 after a battle with cancer, South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported on Sunday. Born on June 5 1947, Molobi was imprisoned on Robben Island during the apartheid era. While in prison he obtained a bachelor’s degree.
Director Shohei Imamura, who portrayed modern Japan’s downtrodden in raw realism and eroticism and became the first Japanese to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes twice, died of cancer in Tokyo on Tuesday. He was 79. Imamura was often considered the top Japanese director since the late Akira Kurosawa.
Edouard Michelin (43), who drowned on Friday in a boating accident, was hailed as a rising French business figure, having helped turn round the fortunes of his family tyre company at a young age. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said he was one of the ”rising figures” of the French economy.
Vince Welnick, the Grateful Dead’s last keyboard player and a veteran of several other bands, including the Tubes and Missing Man Formation, has died at age 55, the Grateful Dead’s long-time publicist said. Welnick died on Friday, said Dennis McNally, who declined to release the cause.