Diary

What's on this week

Today – Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva meets Bolivian President Evo Morales in Villa Tunari, Bolivia

Today – Mobile-phone throwing championships in Punkaharju, Finland

Tomorrow to Thursday – Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, pictured, makes official visit to China

Tomorrow to Friday – Second World Congress of Agroforestry in?Nairobi, Kenya

Monday and Tuesday – Turkish and Pakistani foreign ministers co-chair Friends of Pakistan meeting in Instanbul. Richard Holbrooke, US President Barack Obama's special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, due to attend

Tuesday – French President Nicolas Sarkozy meets representatives of banking and financial sectors to discuss credit market conditions

Tuesday – Palestinian reconciliation talks expected to resume in Cairo

Wednesday to Friday – Twenty-first UN Conference on Disarmament Issues in Niigata, Japan

Wednesday to Sunday – Moscow Auto Show

Thursday – Sentencing of R&B singer Chris Brown for assaulting his former girlfriend Rihanna, in Los Angeles, California

Friday – Index Awards 2009, the world's most lucrative design awards, in Copanhagen, Denmark


This day in history

August 22, 1952 Devil's Island, the smallest and northernmost island of the three Iles du Salut, six nautical miles off the coast of French Guiana, South American, is permanently closed as a French penal colony.

The penitentiary was first opened by Emperor Napoleon III's government in 1852, and became one of the most infamous prisons in history.

While the colony was in use, the inmates were everything from political prisoners to the most hardened of thieves. A great many of the more than 80,000 prisoners sent to the harsh conditions at disease-infested Devil's Island were never seen again.

Other than by boat, the only way out was through a dense jungle. Accordingly, very few convicts ever managed to escape.

Henri Charrière's bestselling book, Papillon, pictured, describes a supposedly successful escape from Devil's Island, with a companion, Sylvain, using two sacks filled with coconuts. Charrière wrote the two men leapt into heavy seas from a cliff and drifted to the mainland over a period of three days. Sylvain died in quicksand a short distance from the shore.

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