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In Iraq a bomb damaged the al-Askari mosque in Samarra; it houses the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams, Ali al-Hadi, who died in ad 868, and his son Hassan al-Askari, who died in 874, the father of the 12th imam, whose return is expected. A demonstration in Maiduguri, in north-eastern Nigeria, that began as a protest against a cartoon depicting Mohammed in a Danish newspaper last September, turned into anti-Christian rioting, with churches and businesses being burned and 15 killed. Rioting in the same cause two days earlier, outside the Italian consulate in Benghazi, Libya, left 10 dead. A collection of documents purportedly connected to al-Qa’eda was declassified by the Criminal Intelligence Agency in the United States; it included notes on holiday entitlement for those employed by the terrorist group. In Nigeria armed militants in the Niger delta seized nine foreigners and attacked oil installations, disrupting the production of 500,000 barrels a day. A mudslide killed an estimated 1,800 people at the farming settlement of Guinsaugon in the Philippines. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who in the 1970s had entangled the Vatican’s banking affairs in an Italian scandal, died, aged 84. A wild duck with the H5N1 strain of avian influenza was found at Joyeux, 20 miles from Lyon, in France. The virus has killed 90 people or so since 2003, but no cases have yet been found of transmission from person to person. A court in Vienna sentenced the British historian David Irving to three years in prison for having denied the genocide of Jews during the second world war when he visited Austria in 1989. The European Commission said that the use of mercury in thermometers and barometers should be banned.
CSH
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