Briefly world

Fidel Castro took questions from Cuban ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry on Friday and warned them of the threat of global nuclear war in his most overtly political public act since re-emerging from four years of near total seclusion....

Fidel warns Cuba envoys of n-war

HAVANA: Fidel Castro took questions from Cuban ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry on Friday and warned them of the threat of global nuclear war in his most overtly political public act since re-emerging from four years of near total seclusion. When something like this nuclear war begins,all the responses are preprogramed, Castro warned.

Oz PM announces Aug 21 elections

CANBERRA: Australias first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard will attempt to win a second term for her Centre-Left government in the August 21 elections,with battle lines drawn on climate change,asylum seekers,and record-high public debt. We would go into our second term with some lessons learnt, Gillard told reporters at Parliament House.

British MP spurns voters in burqas

London: Taking a cue from French parliamentarians,a British Tory lawmaker is refusing to meet his constituents,if they appear before him in burqa. Philip Hollobone from Kettering,a self-styled champion of veil ban in UK has proposed a French-style ban on burqa in the British isles.

India: Nepal passport quality a concern

Kathmandu: India has asked Nepal not to issue passports after media reports claimed that security features in Machine Readable Passports have been diluted. Three months after Nepal scrapped a passport deal with India,New Delhi wrote to the Nepal on July 12,expressing concern over the passport quality printed by a French firm.

Cap still holding,no sign of leak,says BP

NEW ORLEANS: BPs cap was holding on Saturday as the final hours ticked away in a two-day trial run to make sure it keeps oil from pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr Bean faces flak over futuristic home

London: British actor Rowan Atkinson who plays the TV character Mr Bean,has run into trouble with his neighbours over plans to demolish his country mansion and replace it with a futuristic home. The 55-year-old who is UKs richest TV star,wants to build a 30 feet-high flat-roofed plaster-and-glass rectangular home,which the neighbours say will be an eyesore,reported Sun online. The actor married to Indian make-up artist Sunetra Sastry,is worth more than 100 million and the new house will cost a whopping 10 million to build. The design is described as an eroded white cuboid with carefully positioned facade of floating white solid plains.

Holocaust survivor dances to I Will Survive at Auschwitz

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WARSAW: A home video on the Internet showing a Holocaust survivor dancing at Auschwitz and other Holocaust sites to the disco classic I Will Survive with his daughter and grandchildren started a debate. To some,images of Adolek Kohn and his family shuffling is an insult to those who perished; to others a defiant celebration of survival. The incongruous juxtapositions have struck many viewers as funny and chilling at the same time. If the humour is meant to cheapen,then its bad, said Raul Teitelbaum,79,who survived the Nazi camp at Bergen-Belsen. But if the humour is simply a human reaction to tragedy,its all right.