Tom is in bed with a fever.

Yet there he lay, and with a copy of my book The Man Died beside him.

Most of the town still lies under metres of ash, and the capital has been moved to nearby Kokopo.

The image on the computer screen is shocking a man, lying on a hospital bed, his head bandaged, with long trickles of blood running from the top of his scalp.

Maradona has been condemned to lie naked in front of millions of his fans, and his country has been condemned to pursue and reclaim him with its suffocating passion.

The most important place I want to visit, and spend as much time as I can, is the cemetery where my father has rested in peace for the past six years. I haven t been there for almost five years.

Maradona has been condemned to lie naked in front of millions of his fans, and his country has been condemned to pursue and reclaim him with its suffocating passion. So tragic a ritual can have no good end.

While the cameras were rolling, a US marine turned to an unarmed and wounded Iraqi lying on the ground and murdered the man with gunshots to the head.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has insisted on paying an annual visit to the Yasukuni shrine, where Japan s past aggressive wars are glorified, and where war criminals are among the buried, behavior that China s government considers unacceptable.

Using figures from the North Sea and the waters around Australia, as well as from other places, it has been estimated that up to 70 per cent of the marine litter that enters the sea ends up on the seabed, whereas half of the remaining amount (i.e. 15 per cent) is found on beaches and the rest (another 15 per cent) floats on the water surface.

Among the numerous victims, perhaps the most bizarre case was that of a young journalist named Bagauda Kaltho. His body was found in a hotel toilet in the city of Kaduna with the remains of a parcel bomb after an explosion that no one heard.