Another week

• Lil' Bush again declared that victory was being achieved in Iraq, and depicted the Iraqi prime minister as a great hero riding south on his white charger to do "defining" battle with the Shias in Basra. Zimbabwe held its breath to see whether its 84-year-old president, liberation hero turned crook and terrorist, under whom inflation has exceeded 100,000 per cent and a loaf of bread costs a trillion Zimbabwe dollars, will manage to get himself elected for yet another term. In Los Angeles airport, a woman was made to remove her nipple ring with a pliers before being allowed to check through security to catch her plane to Dallas: it was unclear what dastardly act she had planned to carry out with it.

• In Trinidad and Tobago, the House of Representatives went into meltdown when the opposition leader was suspended for using a laptop, which the government had kindly provided. As a result, parliamentary debate on food prices, which have risen 19 per cent in the last year, was abandoned. A policeman was in trouble for going skinny-dipping with some young Colombian women who had arrived illegally in a small boat over the Easter weekend. The murder count reached 100 for the year. A report from the Penn State Justice and Safety Institute recommended that the next police commissioner should be more "visible, aggressive and unbiased": it was not known how much the government paid to obtain this valuable information.

• Villagers did battle with officials from the National Energy Company who had been sent to start soil testing for an access road to yet another port, this one to service a steel mill which the locals do not want and claim not to have been consulted about. The company complained that every time people mounted protests like this, it lost money; and that since no Certificate of Environmental Clearance was required, no harm to the environment could be involved. It was suggested in the weekend press that the prime minister, having postponed local elections three times already, was thinking of postponing them again.

• The English swooned over Nicholas Sarkozy's new wife, and spread topless photos of her over the tabloid press during the French president's state visit. On Thursday, a new terminal was opened at London's Heathrow airport, costing US$8.6 billion; so wonderfully bungled was the project that by the weekend there were 20,000 suitcases separated from their owners, hundreds of cancelled flights and thousands upon thousands of furious travellers. Perhaps the T&T prime minister, who aspires to "developed nation status" for his country by 2020, should take comfort: we are already well ahead. Our new airport terminal only involved some leaking roofs and a little traditional corruption.