China blasts Japanese officials’ visit to Yasukuni Shrine on WWII anniversary

Published for the first time this month, the Irish writer’s record of his months in pre-war Germany is a fascinating insight into his understanding of, and unease with, Nazism War was not yet on the immediate horizon when Samuel Beckett visited the German city of Hamburg in October 1936, but after watching the apoplexy that Adolf Hitler’s braying induced in ordinary Germans, the Irish playwright was certain that peace could not last. “They’ll need to fight soon (or burst),” he noted in his diary on 6 October. The six notebooks that Beckett compiled during his six-month journey across Germany between late September 1936 and April 1937, published for the first time by German publisher Suhrkamp on 20 August this year, put paid to a commonly held view of the author of Waiting for Godot as a poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics...

Palestinian residents of three houses in Qusra near Nablus in the occupied West Bank say they have been effectively cut off from food and other supplies since the siege by Israeli settlers began on Sunday. But the Israeli military has not done anything to remove the settlers. "We are seeing the cracks of Israeli politics, including a paralysed prime minister’s inability to condemn basic filmed violent acts, play out in the West Bank," says FRANCE 24 correspondent Noga Tarnopolsky.

The government has been taking a fortnightly review to ensure domestic availability of the retail fuels