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In the small village of Bagnone, the hunt is on for the winner of Italy’s massive lottery

jackpot, thought to be Europe’s biggest ever.
Speculation is rife among the Tuscan village’s 2,000 residents as to who owns the lucky

Superenalotto ticket – worth 146.9m euros (￡128.3m; $211.8m).
Candidates include a woodcutter, builder and shopkeeper. Italian lottery winners are rarely

named in public.
The local mayor has already said the cash could do wonders for Bagnone.
Gianfranco Lazzeroni told Italy’s Rai television that he would ask the winner to help fund a

planned community centre with a price tag of 1 million euros.
Crowds filled the town’s main square on Saturday night, converging on the cafe where the

winning ticket was sold, and celebrating late into the night. The festive mood continued on

Sunday.
The mayor said he could not glean any clues as to the identity of the winner.
“I know all of them, I saw them party yesterday, I looked into their eyes, but I could not

see any revealing detail,” he told Rai TV.
The lucky resident also came up during the Sunday sermon at church.
“I hope he will be able to look after this fortune well, and do good with it and use it to

help others through generous acts,” Father Marco Giuntini was quoted as saying by the AFP

news agency.
Italian state news agency Ansa reported that the winner – who bought the winning ticket at

the Biffi coffee bar in Bagnone – had spent just two euros on the ticket.
It was the first time anyone had won the state-run Superenalotto since January. The previous

biggest jackpot in its 12-year history was 100 million euros.

The winner of a 360m yuan ($52.7m; ￡32m) lottery in China remains a mystery after he

appeared at a news conference in sunglasses and a mask.
He took nearly three weeks to claim his prize, fuelling speculation that the lottery had been

fixed.
The winner, from Anyang in central China’s Henan province, announced he was donating 10m yuan

to a charity, the official Xinhua news agency said.
He said he would use the rest to expand his business.
The man spent about $25 on 44 identical “Double Colour Ball” tickets issued by the China

Welfare Lottery on 8 October, said Xinhua.
The winner said some of the money he was donating would pay for the treatment of a nine-year

-old girl with uremia, an illness associated with kidney failure.

For as long as South Africa’s opposition parties champion pro-business policies, they will

fail to threaten the power of the incoming African National Congress government, led by the

controversial Jacob Zuma.
Most poor black South Africans see the long-established Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which

retained its status as the official opposition in the national election, as the political

front of white business, and the newly formed Congress of the People (Cope), which came

third, as that of black business.
With their combined vote being more than 20%, the two parties will now be under pressure to

merge to effectively challenge the ANC in the 2014 election.
“We’ve got to realign politics in South Africa and that’s what I’m going to spend the next

five years doing,” said the DA leader, Helen Zille, after the election.
As South Africans vote for parties, not constituency MPs, realignment is possible only if the

DA and Cope merge. But this is unlikely to happen within five years, because of personality,

policy and racial differences between the two parties.
And the reality is no party can beat the ANC, which has existed for nearly a century, without

striking a chord with South Africa’s shack-dwellers, farm workers, job-seekers and domestic

workers.
These are the people who gave Mr Zuma a decisive victory but they also pose the biggest

threat to him and his party. They are part of the “social movements” that have emerged in

South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994 to campaign around bread-and-butter issues.

The Syrian capital, Damascus, is becoming a popular destination for foreigners who want to learn Arabic. The BBC’s Paul Moss, who spent time there earlier this year, was inspired to study hard by his encounters with the city’s people.
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters
Alex sent a text message to say he had been bitten by a snake. Perhaps I was unfair, but I reckoned he was making it up.
Among the great pantheon of excuses people have made for missing an exam, “attack by snake” must rate as one of the more implausible.
But Alex had sent the text message to several of my classmates, asking them to inform the authorities at Damascus University.
He would be absent, he said, from the final test for “Arabic level one” as he was still recovering from the venomous injury.
I doubt whether Alex’s story will put many people off coming here.
Studying Arabic in Damascus is increasingly popular.
For anyone wanting to learn the language the city has become a Mecca, if you will pardon a somewhat inappropriate metaphor.
I had come because I often report from the Middle East for the BBC and thought it would be useful to be able to phone someone’s office, for example, and ask for an interview.
Failing that, I hoped I might at least be able to stop at a cafe en route for the interview and use my linguistic skills to order a falafel.
The need to speak Arabic for work was what had driven several of the people on my course to come here.

As the US tries to restart peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Jeremy Bowen says the fundamental differences between the two sides will need to be addressed before there can be a realistic chance of success.
Israelis are good at welcoming family and friends.
Shops in the concourse at Tel Aviv airport sell presents for the new arrivals. You can buy a nice bunch of flowers, a blow-up love heart, or a balloon shaped like a helicopter gunship.
One family, excited and emotional as they waited for some longed-for reunion, stood under their hovering balloon, military green with painted-on missiles and a payload of helium.
This week, Israel has been hanging on to a real-life flying tragedy.
A young pilot, Captain Assaf Ramon, was killed when his F-16 jet crashed on a hill in the West Bank during a training flight.
The young man’s father – a celebrated air force flyer who took part in the raid on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 – was Israel’s first astronaut. He was killed when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003.
One of the reporters at the funeral looked round the graveyard and saw a continuous thread, not just between the son being laid alongside his dead father, but also with the first Zionists in the area. He called them farmers with guns, two of whom were killed by Arabs 77 years ago.
Many Israelis feel as if they are surrounded by enemies.
That is why, in a country with compulsory military service, it does not feel strange to greet someone at the airport with an inflatable gunship. It is why a reporter can connect the deaths of a young pilot today and those of pioneers in the last century.

“Where were you? Where were you?,” screams the veiled woman on the screen, before breaking into heaving sobs.
She has already lost one son to drug-related gang violence and the other is late home.
“I was really crying, I wasn’t acting,” says Nisrin Rihan, one of the non-professional actors catapulted into the international limelight by the film Ajami.
Next year, the gritty tale about mafia-style murders will become the first Arabic language film to represent Israel at the Oscars.
Like Ms Rihan, who has lost three relatives to gang crime, most of its actors are locals with first-hand experience of the sprawling, scruffy streets of Ajami, a former slum in the port city of Jaffa.
Impoverished Israeli Arabs shooting one another in the shadow of the gleaming towers of Tel Aviv is far from Israel’s preferred international image.
And the aggressive police and brutal killing of a Jewish character shows a dark underside to the ideal of coexistence sometimes touted in mixed Jewish-Arab areas like Jaffa.
But many Israeli film critics and cinema-goers are nevertheless gushing over the film, shot in an intense, documentary style.
Directed jointly by Yaron Shani, a Jewish Israeli, and Skander Copti, an Israeli Arab born and raised in Ajami, it has so far clocked up the Israeli Ophir and Wolgin prizes, and a special mention in Cannes.
But in Ajami itself, the reaction is mixed.

The Financial Services Authority is guilty of a “systematic failure of duty” over the Northern Rock crisis, a key parliamentary committee has said.
The Treasury committee said the UK’s financial watchdog should have spotted the bank’s “reckless” business plan.
To help prevent any further crisis, the report calls for the Bank of England to set up a head of financial stability.
The FSA said it had already admitted failings in relation to Northern Rock and was “addressing” them.
“We will also examine carefully any further lessons that emerge from our internal review of the supervision of Northern Rock,” it said in a statement.
Committee chairman John McFall said Northern Rock’s directors were primarily to blame, but added that financial stability safeguards “failed abysmally”.
“Northern Rock had only one well from which to drink, and the FSA should have realised that,” he said.
It was a failure of the regulator not to see systemic risk.”
Northern Rock has been given ￡25bn of emergency Bank of England loans.
The funds – which are, in effect, taxpayers’ money – have been given to Northern Rock since last September.
The Newcastle-based lender got itself into financial difficulties because its business model left it ill-prepared for the global credit crunch.

A number of measures have been introduced in recent months to protect people’s savings amid the financial crisis.
The system was changed to ease the Northern Rock crisis
The first measure announced was an increase in the amount of bank deposits guaranteed by the government, which has gone up from ￡35,000 to ￡50,000.
The latest move guaranteed the UK savers’ deposits at Icelandic internet bank Icesave.
So exactly what kind of protection do savers have in the event of a UK-regulated bank or building society going bust?
How did all this come about?
The crisis at Northern Rock last year brought into sharp focus the question of how safe our savings are.
A system has been in place for some time to protect people’s money, but it did not prevent people raising concerns as they queued to withdraw their cash from Northern Rock.
The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) was strengthened in October 2007 to ease the crisis, and there have been months of debate since then on how to improve the system.
So what has changed?
Before the Northern Rock furore, 100% of the first ￡2,000 of deposits, then 90% of the next ￡33,000 were protected.
On 1 October 2007, that was extended to all of the first ￡35,000 per bank per customer.
Then, since 7 October 2008, that threshold has been raised so each saver’s first ￡50,000 per bank is fully protected.
This only counts for a net deposit, so if you had ￡50,000 deposited but also had a ￡20,000 loan with the same bank, then only ￡30,000 would be compensated.

Threats to the safety of savings and the search for good returns at times of low interest rates have been a constant source of concern for savers.
An array of information is available through the BBC News website and various groups offer help for struggling householders.
The rescue of Northern Rock and the subsequent banking crisis brought the safety of savings into sharp focus.
Savings up to ￡50,000 per person per licensed bank are guaranteed, should any UK-regulated bank or building society go bust.
A couple with a joint account is covered per person. So each person in a couple would have ￡50,000 covered in the account – so up to ￡100,000 in total would be protected.
Schemes in the EU have to offer compensation for at least the first 20,000 euros (￡16,300), although they may offer significantly more than that.
For further advice start with this guide to the safety of savings.
If you are worried about your deposits, see this question and answer explanation of savings protection.
The UK programme is run by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
You can always go to the BBC News website’s in-depth section on savings and investments for the latest news and guides.

The UK economy unexpectedly contracted by 0.4% between July and September, according to official figures, meaning the country is still in recession.
It is the first time UK gross domestic product (GDP) has contracted for six consecutive quarters, since quarterly figures were first recorded in 1955.
But the figures could still be revised up or down at a later date, because this figure is only the first estimate.
GDP measures the total amount of goods and services produced by a country.
The pound fell sharply after the figures were released, reflecting the fact that many observers had expected the UK to have grown during the quarter.
It was down 1.7% against the dollar, at $1.6323, and down 1.9% against the euro, at 1.0859 euros.
Quarterly growth of 0.2% had been expected in the figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), although expectations had been tempered by recent figures showing no growth in retail sales in September, and a 2.5% decline in industrial output in August.
There’s no disguising how grim these figures are. Almost every City analyst expected there to be positive growth in the third quarter. Instead it was negative.
That means the recession in the UK is the longest since modern records began in the 1950s.
Germany, France and Japan have all come out of recession technically and the UK hasn’t. The decline has continued.
And the markets didn’t really like the look of that. The foreign exchange markets have been selling the pound.