Reuters Photo by Kevin Lamarque
Student Christina Todd, from Greenville, S.C., hugs her mother Sallie who came to take her home from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, April 18, 2007. Many students have left or plan to leave the campus as classes are suspended until next week after a student killed 32 people and then himself on Monday.

Compiled by MARK MAATHUIS

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Tragedy without borders

Around the world, people expressed their horror over the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Great Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair said he felt a “profound sadness.”

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said that the people of South Korea “can only feel shock and a wrenching of our hearts.”

India and Israel especially mourn the loss of student Minal Panchal and Professor Liviu Librescu.

In Germany and Australia, the expressions of sympathy were combined with calls for gun control.

For many Australians, the massacre brought back memories of 1996, when a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle killed at least 34 people in that nation’s worst massacre. This incident led the Australian government to make gun laws tighter.

More information about the shooter, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, has come to light. The “Question mark kid,” as his classmates described him, was “angry” with the world. Two plays he wrote for class involve violence, weapons and murders.

NATIONAL NEWS

Did he buy her love?

New allegations said the Pentagon interfered in Paul Wolfowitz’s girlfriend’s career at the World Bank as long ago as 2003. Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, has so far refused to resign after admitting that he approved a large pay raise for his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza.

Ali Riza and Wolfowitz have been together for six years.

Many have taken this opportunity to remind people that Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary of defense in the Bush administration, was one of the architects of the war in Iraq.

TRIVIAL NEWS

Space record

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams participated in the 111th edition of the Boston Marathon while she was in space. With her race No. 14,000 taped to the front of the treadmill, the Indian-American astronaut watched the race in Boston live on two laptop computers. Though she was traveling at 17,500 mph, it took her 4:22:46 to finish the 26.2 miles. But because she was the first to run a marathon in space, she holds the intergalactic record.

Time to start swimming

If you cannot get enough of the movie, now is your chance to actually own a piece of the Titanic. Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome bought 3.3 pounds of steel from the sunken ship and will use it to manufacture 2012 watches to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster in 2012.

The watches will cost between $7,800 and $173,000. Seems like a lot of money for something that is guaranteed to be neither shockproof nor water resistant.