It's ok to criticize or start a debate. But Günter Grass should have written a political essay rather than a poem, says DW's Bettina Marx.

Günter Grass has done a disservice to all those who warn of an Israeli attack on Iran. Now they must all be made culpable for his overblown rhetoric. With his curious poem he has overshot the mark to such an extent that one can only shake one's head.

The Israeli government is not planning its first atomic strike against Iran, as he suggests in his verses. And Israel harbors no fantasies regarding the annihilation of the Islamic republic, which itself denies the Jewish state the right to existence.

BRUSSELS - A top scientist within the EU agency authorising new drugs resigned on Wednesday (4 April) after being fired from France's national regulator, itself embroiled in scandals over poisonous diabetes drugs and failing breast implants.

Eric Abadie, a French specialist in diabetes and heart-related diseases, had for the past five years been chaired a panel of experts giving scientific advice to the European Medicines Agency on authorising the sale of new drugs on the EU market.

AP - China was struggling Thursday to restore several government websites that international hacking group Anonymous says it attacked in an apparent protest against Chinese Internet restrictions.

On a Twitter account established in late March, Anonymous China listed the websites it says it hacked over the last several days. They include government bureaus in several Chinese cities, including in Chengdu, a provincial capital in southwest China.

Some of the sites were still blocked Thursday, with error messages shown.

AFP - Deadly malaria that is resistant to drug treatment has spread rapidly to the border between Thailand and Myanmar, raising concerns of an uncontrollable epidemic, scientists said Thursday.

A pair of studies published in The Lancet and the journal Science showed how the disease is moving fast into new territory and identified a region of the parasite's genome that may be responsible for mutating in order to survive.

AFP - A Tunisian court has sentenced two youths to seven years in prison for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, the justice ministry said Thursday.

"They were sentenced, one of them in absentia, to seven years in prison, for transgressing morality, defamation and disrupting public order," ministry spokesman Chokri Nefti told AFP.

The sentences were handed down on March 28 and defence lawyers have appealed the decision.

One of the two young men was jailed but the other was not in court for the verdict. They are both from the town of Mahdia, around 200 kilometres (120 miles) south of Tunis.

AP - A wildly popular Internet video turned African warlord Joseph Kony into a household name and boosted the international hunt for the brutal rebel leader. Can a sequel do more?

That's the burning question for the small California advocacy group Invisible Children and its follow-up effort, "Kony 2012 Part II." The Associated Press was given a copy of the sequel before its Thursday release.

Part II repeats some of the same slick, inspiring shots as the original of a young global community mobilizing into action. But noticeably missing is the voice of the organization's co-founder, Jason Russell, who directed the first video.

A dust devil is a term for a relatively small swirl of air with dust trapped in it so that it is visible. They are normally not very big. A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles high was captured whirling its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14. It was imaged by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite its height, the plume is little more than three-quarters of a football field wide (70 yards, or 70 meters).

Goat, girl, Google goggles. Gee, gee, gee.

Google Project Glass: will we really wear digital goggles? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

The tricky questions are whether anyone actually wants a head-mounted display. If you were a soldier, for example, you would want to know if there were snipers hiding behind a wall, and if you could bring in a drone (pilotless aircraft) to fire at them. As a pedestrian crossing the street, the sudden appearance of a special offer from a nearby carpet retailer might have less happy consequences (since this is Google, you can bet ads are part of the master plan).