World Briefs

Author: Caroline Vial

No sex before suffrage

"Are you faithful?" inquired the European radio station RTL 102.5 to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who responded, "I have often been faithful." Flighty or not, this answer was followed by Berlusconi's promise to observe a "total sexual abstinence" until the country's general election on April 9. Sue Emittenza promised Priest Massimiliano Pusceddu not to use his body toward any ungodly ends, who congratulated the politician for his defense of family values during an electoral meeting in Sardinia. "Good thing he did not postpone the elections," notes the Corriere della Sera.

- Corriere della Sera, Milan



Coincidental Fate

A Soviet-built An-24 plane operated by the Slovak military crashed into a mountain in Hungary on January 19h, killing 42 people, mostly peacekeepers returning from a NATO mission in Kosovo. .

The sole survivor, Martin Farkas, was using the restroom when the aircraft proceeded to crash. Incidentally, Farkas was carrying a four-leaved clover in his wallet, remarks the Hongarian agency MTI.

- Courrier International, Paris.



V-day controversies

St. Valentine's Day, celebrated around the world on Feb. 14, has been unable to escape controversy.

Chinese authorities who are suspicious of the religious origins of the celebrations, according to BBC News, confiscated flowers from passers-by. Conservative Hindu protesters in India disrupted festivities in public areas, as they consider Valentine's Day to be an alien Western import and anathema to Hindu culture.

Yet, neither ideological objection nor militant intervention appears to have been able to check the growing international popularity of this day.

- BBC News, London



Stupefying results

There seems to be plenty of snow at the jet-set Alpine Swiss resort, Saint Moritz, where during high season, up to 1,400 lines of cocaine are inhaled every day. The institute of pharmaceutical and biomedical research in Nuremberg performed the tests on December 29 and 30, on used waters. Traces of benzoylectgonine, a derivative of cocaine, were found in the urine of consumers.

"Everybody says that cocaine is a rich person's drug. We wanted to verify this ourselves, and what is a better place than Saint Moritz?," said professor Fritz Sorgel to the Sunday Telegraph. "The results were unbelievable."

- The Sunday Telegraph, London