Briefly

EGYPT

President orders govt shift to new capital

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on Wednesday ordered his administration to start moving its offices next month to a new administrative capital in the desert outside Cairo. The $45 billion city is the biggest of the megaprojects that Sisi has launched since taking office in 2014. It is being built on 69,000 hectares about 50 kilometers east of Cairo. It is planned to house 6.5 million people. The new capital will be home to most government buildings and the parliament.

FRANCE

Impounded British trawler sails home

A British scallop boat impounded by French authorities sailed out of the French port of Le Havre on Wednesday and was heading home, ending a standoff that aggravated tensions between Paris and London over fishing rights. Earlier on Wednesday, a court in the French city of Rouen had ruled the vessel, the Cornelis Gert Jan, was free to leave, a lawyer for the captain told Reuters. The vessel was seized last week, with French authorities saying it had been caught fishing for scallops in French territorial waters without a valid license.

SOUTH ASIA

At least 23 killed in Kashmir bus plunge

At least 23 people, including women and children, were killed when a passenger bus plunged 500 meters into a ravine in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir on Wednesday. Police officer Rashid Naeem Khan said the bus had been heading for the city of Rawalpindi when it went out of control. Road accidents are common in the mountainous terrain due to the poor roads and twists and turns.

UNITED KINGDOM

South Africa's Galgut wins Booker Prize

South African playwright and novelist Damon Galgut on Wednesday won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, his third shortlisted novel. It chronicles a family in his homeland from the late apartheid era to Jacob Zuma's presidency. Spanning several decades, the book shows the family's growing disintegration as the country emerges into democracy. Speaking to journalists, Galgut pointed out that this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to another African writer, Zanzibar-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. That "would suggest that perhaps the volume is going up in Africa", he said.

Agencies - Xinhua