July 13, 2003

QUE RAIO DE SEMANA
A «Spectator» tem uma coluna regular intitulada «Portrait Of The Week» que se revela sempre de uma leitura deliciosa. Não resisto a transcrever parte da que saíu na edição mais recente da revista: «Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy, annoyed the Germans by telling Martin Schulz, a German MEP: ‘Mr Schulz, there is a producer in Italy making a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I shall have to recommend you for the role of commandant. You would be perfect.’ Mr Berlusconi, who was responding to claims that he is unfit to represent the European Union during Italy’s six-month presidency, explained that he was making an ‘ironic’ joke, but Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany demanded an apology. Mr Berlusconi declined to do more than express ‘regret’ that he had been misinterpreted. Mr Schröder threatened to cancel his summer holiday in Italy. Two young Chechen women killed themselves and 15 other people by detonating explosive-filled belts at a rock festival in Moscow. Laleh and Ladan Bijani, Siamese twins joined at the head, died aged 29 on the third day of an operation in Singapore to separate them. Several American soldiers and a young British journalist, Richard Wild, were killed in Iraq. Arab broadcasters played two taped messages of support, apparently from Saddam Hussein, for ‘the heroic resistance fighters’ in Iraq. The Foreign Office and the House of Commons expressed concern about Washington’s decision to put two Britons held at Guantanamo Bay — Feroz Abbasi from Croydon and Moazam Begg from Birmingham — on trial before an American military tribunal. The chief executive of Hong Kong, Tung Chee-Hwa, was forced to bow to popular pressure and delay an anti-subversion law. In South Korea, a father hurled his daughter’s computer out of a 12th-floor window, annoyed that she was surfing the Internet instead of greeting him. The computer landed on a four-year-old girl, inflicting severe facial injuries. »