"It's Burkina!" yelled a woman, referring jovially to recent riots in Burkina Faso, which led to the downfall of its president, Blaise Compaoré, after 27 years in power.
THE brash little city-state of Dubai jovially claims to have won a Guinness record for the world's biggest-ever fireworks display, but other Arab capitals greeted the new year with gloom rather than glee.
The assorted Congress and BJP politicians managed to mingle without obvious rancour Jairam Ramesh, a former minister, made a point of jovially shaking lots of hands.
Mr Fox campaigned for the bill, ordered police protection for a two-week Zapatist peace cavalcade to Mexico city, and jovially brushed off the rebel leader's persistent barbs.
Mr Berlusconi schmoozed with the guests of honour (merrily referring to one of them as "George Dubya"), played the piano for the assembled bigwigs, told them the story of the founding of Rome (and jovially muddled up the founders' names), congratulated NATO's secretary-general, Lord Robinson (ie, Robertson), on his navy-blue tie.
And although reviewers have been jovially describing good games as "addictive" for years, might the fun be wearing thin?
The mayor said he was acting alone; but the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, later said that Mr Luzhkov would act as Moscow's mediator between the two sides ("It doesn't mean that someone else can't be his brother too," he jovially reassured a Georgian journalist).
Whatever the outcome, as the Left's leader, Gudrun Schyman, jovially puts it: "The red team won".
His portrait of the state-sponsored anti-Semitism directed against the Soviet physicist, Viktor Shtrum, is especially chilling, set against the jovially run gas chambers on the other side of the front-line.Eventually the book took off and "Life and Fate" is now considered one of the most important Russian novels of the last century.
A somewhat sweaty gay picnic in Long Island would not be every politician's cup of tea: it is hard to imagine, say, Pat Buchanan jovially introducing his wife to two ear-ringed young men, still swaying to Lou Reed's "Perfect Day".
The Spaniard responded, jovially, but also pointedly, after his team selection on the south coast had been questioned in the British media.
