August 19, 2003

A SEMANA
Mr Charles Taylor resigned as President of Liberia and flew to Nigeria; ‘History will be kind to me,’ he said. ‘I have accepted this role as the sacrificial lamb.’ Mr Taylor had won elections in 1997 with the unusual slogan ‘You killed my ma, you killed my pa. I’ll vote for you.’ A lorry bomb killed 12 and wounded 50 at the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. Men rioted in the streets of Basra, southern Iraq, in temperatures of 122?F (50?C); they demanded electricity supplies. Zimbabwe laboured under gross inflation, with banks running out of banknotes and the 30 per cent of the workforce who are employed being left without wages. Hezbollah shelled a northern Israeli town from southern Lebanon, killing a 16-year-old boy. Mr Nick Warner, head of the Australian intervention force in the Solomon Islands, held talks with Mr Harold Keke, a gang leader, who admitted that six Anglican missionaries his men had taken hostage four months ago had been killed. In Brazil 84 men escaped from Silvio Porto prison through a 50-yard tunnel. The suicide rate in Russia reached 38.4 per 100,000 last year, with more than one in a thousand men between the ages of 45 and 57 killing themselves; only Lithuania is more suicidal. Lady Mosley, the widow of Sir Oswald Mosley, died in Paris, aged 93. In early opinion polls Arnold Schwarzenegger was the leading candidate for the governorship of California, for which elections will be held on 7 October. - excerto de «Portrait Of The Week», publicado pela revista Spectator