Europe's commissioner for humanitarian aid arrived in war-shattered Kabul yesterday on the highest-level visit by a Western politician since the Islamic Taleban captured the city a year ago. Emma Bonino said she was shocked at the scale of the destruction in the Afghan capital. "It is one thing to read about it in a dossier, but I didn't expect to see so much destruction. It is shocking to see it at first hand," she said after visiting a minefield being cleared by the Halo Trust, a British charity which receives funding from the European Commission Humanitarian Office. Ms Bonino visited the minefields and a refuge for street children yesterday.
Luciano Pavarotti has hailed the late Princess of Wales as a symbol of womanhood who would have made a fantastic queen. "I knew her as the sweetest of people. I knew her as a person who was a symbol of the modern woman who was sweet and intelligent and with regal manners, the tenor told the Sunday Telegraph. "She was a symbol of womanhood, she was a symbol of the queen. She might easily have become queen and she would have made a fantastic queen." Diana, killed in a Paris car crash on August 31st, regularly attended Pavarotti's Three Tenors concerts which he performed with Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo.
British Chancellor Gordon Brown enjoyed an evening out with his friend Sarah Macaulay last night on the eve of his big Labour Party conference speech. The bachelor Chancellor was all smiles as he accompanied Macaulay (33) to a reception at Brighton's Grand Hotel.
The pair, said to have been dating for more than two years, have only recently started appearing together in public. Macaulay is co-founder of Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications, a PR firm she set up with Julia Hobsbawm, daughter of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.