World briefs
Anti-cuts ‘street party’ in UK
Hundreds of anti-cuts protesters held an “alternative street party” in the road where UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg lives.
Yesterday, up to 400 people gathered in a south-west London street in the event organised by UK Uncut. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said there wereno reported arrests outside the property in Putney .
Jean Sandler, 42, a UK Uncut supporter said: “Nick Clegg is one of the architects of austerity; he’s a millionaire and lives in a million pound home.”
Four killed in drone attack
An American drone fired two missiles at a bakery in northwest Pakistan yesterday and killed four suspected militants, officials said, as the US pushed on with its drone campaign despite Pakistani demands to stop. It was the third such strike in the country in less than a week.
Drone attacks in Pakistani tribal areas where Afghan and other militants have found refuge are considered a key tactic by US officials in the war against al Qaida and its Taliban supporters. But many Pakistanis resent the strikes, which they consider an affront to their sovereignty. Two Pakistani intelligence officials said the latest attack took place in Miran Shah, the main town in the North Waziristan tribal region.
Greece ‘sentenced to poverty’
German Nobel literature laureate Guenter Grass has criticised Greece’s treatment in the debt crisis, describing it in a new poem as a “country sentenced to poverty”.
The 84-year-old’s latest work, Europe’s Disgrace, was published yesterday in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. It comes less than two months after Grass triggered a storm of criticism with another intervention on a political issue – a prose poem sharply criticising Israel amid the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
Grass writes that Greece has been “pilloried naked asa debtor”.
He says: “You will wasteaway spiritlessly without the country whose spirit, Europe, conceived you.”