”Sharon, Lily is waiting for you.” The message being spray-painted around Israel contains menace: Lily, Ariel Sharon’s wife, died of lung cancer in 2000; now hardline Jewish opponents of the prime minister are willing him to join her. The alternative version of the graffito — ”Sharon, Rabin is waiting for you” — is a more direct threat.

European hopes that the Bush administration would bring a more multilateral approach to its foreign policy were dealt a blow on Monday with the nomination of an outspoken hawk as the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. John Bolton, the nominee and a former undersecretary of state for arms control, has built a reputation for public disdain for international treaties.

Three works by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, stolen from a hotel in southern Norway, were recovered on Monday less than 24 hours after they were taken. Two were lithographs (one of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, the other of Munch himself), and the third a watercolour of a woman in a blue dress, estimated together to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Police in a sprawling working-class suburb on the edge of the Mexican capital are to fight crime with a new weapon: books. The left-wing mayor of Nezahualcoyotl, Luis Sanchez, has ordered all 1 100 members of the municipal police to read at least one book a month or forfeit their chance of promotion.

The British government is to back punitive measures against the Sudanese government after losing patience over the worsening humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Until now the British Foreign Office has argued that persuasion was more productive than sanctions and other measures.

A six-year-old boy was suspended from a Christian school near Chicago last week after his mother refused to hit him for misbehaving. In recent months Chandler Fallaw had returned home from Shaumburg Christian school with disciplinary notes for showing off, offering his teacher chewing gum, not finishing his work and bringing toys into class.