Category: Story

Some of the nine Mormon women and children massacred in Mexico were reportedly shot at point blank range. The victims died while driving in Sonora, 80 miles south of the US border, where drug cartels have been fighting a turf war. A US law enforcement official told the New York Post that, rather than dying in…

On Friday afternoon the residents of Rolfsgatan, a cobbled street of desirable former workers’ cottages in the Swedish city of Malmö, held a street party. There was a barbecue, with hotdogs and toasted marshmallows.  But it wasn’t to mark some sort of jubilee. It was because of the explosion.  At two o’clock on the previous…

The old Trabant factory lies abandoned on a hill overlooking the east German city of Zwickau, plaster crumbling from its brickwork, and gaping holes in the windows where the glass is gone. It is a potent image: the factory where they built the car that became a symbol of communist East Germany, left to fall slowly…

Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, has tendered his resignation after pressure from the military and allegations of vote-rigging.  I resign my post as president," Mr Morales said in a televised address, capping a day of fast-moving events in which several ministers and senior officials quit as support for Latin America’s longest-serving president crumbled.  It came…

The International Space Station will be the first wine cellar in space after a dozen bottles of soon to be space-aged Bordeaux were launched into orbit.  The 12 bottles of Grand Cru, packed in protective metal containers, docked at the International Space Station after being rocketed into space by NASA. The wine will be aged…

It seemed like a sensible way out of a spot of local bother. With a querulous clan of local mystics threatening the social order of Kenya’s tea country back in the 1930s, the colony’s British overlords thought they had hit on the obvious solution: deport the lot of them. Decades after the end of Empire, that decision is…

Police units in four key Bolivian cities declared themselves in mutiny against the government of president Evo Morales and joined protesters in demanding a second round of voting amid allegations of election fraud. Officers from an anti-riot police unit unfurled a banner reading “Evo Morales Out!” from the roof of their station in Cochabamba, in…

Tens of thousands of Swiss citizens are calling for an end to "trophy hunting" of the country’s iconic ibex by foreigners who pay up to £15,000 to shoot the long-horned ruminants at close range. Some 46,000 have signed a petition in the past two week in the wake of a TV investigation showing big game…

The heirs of two Holocaust victims have sued the Lehman Foundation in New York over a multi-million dollar painting, both claiming their families owned the painting before the Nazi era.  The 1917 painting by Egon Schiele, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, was purchased by Robin Owen Lehman – the son of late the banker Robert Lehman – from…

For the first time in village history, a princess will lead the self-declared micro-nation of Seborga, an eccentric hilltop hamlet on the Italian Riviera which has claimed sovereignty for six decades.  The newly elected Princess of Seborga or La Sua Tremendita – Her Tremendousness, as she will be affectionately known by inhabitants – is Nina…