There is a crisis in literature. Readers have stopped reading, and drawn instead to other perhaps more modish forms of entertainment. Sales are down, authors are despondent, salons are closing and literary lunches have become drab affairs. But United States publishers have come to the rescue.

Johannesburg Metro Police have arrested nine staff members in their crackdown against corruption, spokesperson Wayne Minnaar said on Wednesday. He said that investigations were finalised on Tuesday and by Wednesday, two of corrupt policemen had appeared in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court.

The loud squawking noise came in the middle of the night. For a week a middle-aged couple in Wacken, a village in the state of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, were woken by the piercing crowing of a cockerel. Eventually Jens Nagel and his wife complained to the police, but despite three separate visits to the house, officers were unable to find the bird.

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese turned Wednesday’s funeral of their former prime minister Rafik Hariri into a huge public demonstration against three decades of Syrian occupation. During a 5km procession through the capital, Beirut, mourners chanted ”We need Syria out”, and ”We don’t want Bashar [Assad, the Syrian president]”.

There is one broad certainty about the highly professional assassination of Rafik Hariri, the billionaire former prime minister who has dominated Lebanese politics since the end of the civil war in 1991. He fell victim to the hapless role this small, politically fragile and religiously divided country is once again playing: the battleground of international conflicts larger than itself.