In the green and wooded countryside which skirts Lake Geneva and has been civilized since Roman times, I found a unique juxtaposition. The convent of Fille Dieu sits quietly at the foot of the medieval town of Romont, neighboured by horses and sheep in lush fields. Within its walls, there has been constant prayer since 1253. There I met the Abbess, a French philosopher and nuclear physicist, who for the past 37 years has devoted herself to the life of the spirit.

The silence was almost tangible. It hung over a stony hillside scarred by the skeletons of mulga trees, a landscape stilled as if in reverence for the sacred carvings etched in the sheer red faces of the gorge.

In 1975 the Senate created a landmark in the history of Australian race relations when it passed without dissent a motion stating that before 1788, Australia's indigenous peoples possessed the whole country. It urged `the Australian Government to... introduce legislation to compensate (these) people...

In today's Australia it is no surprise that most of us find the name of one of our foremost social thinkers hard to pronounce.

Since he left school and home as a 14-year-old, Reg Blow has tried most things: railway construction, truck driving, boxing, fruit picking, share farming, to name a few.

A lively and determined group, born since independence, they presented a quite different picture of Africa to the stereotype of despair often portrayed.

The blend of voluntary and compulsory effort which built Australia produced its own distinctive culture of daring, enterprise, skull-duggery, bravado and basic achievement. So began great cities - Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Brisbane and later Perth and Adelaide.

My wife and I were back in the area and often met little groups of Tibetan refugees, straggling down through the Himalayan foothills, offering to sell their few possessions for Indian rupees. It was then I began to fear that the world might be losing a precious culture.

Pope John Paul II has opened the windows of the Vatican to the world more widely than any of his predecessors.

Reconciliation in Zimbabwe' was the headline the Bern daily Der Bund gave its report on the launching of the German version of Alec Smith's book Now I call him brother.

If talking was a commodity, Africa would not have any problem,' quipped Gary Magadzire, President of the Zimbabwe National Farmers Union.

At his first health service union meeting, former Welsh steel worker Albert Tarling unexpectedly found himself elected branch secretary.

Maggie Kirk, Pippa Faunce and Caroline Hewitt have now left their schools in Birmingham and the south of England.