And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned".
Ninety-two corpses have been found in the Niger desert; mothers with braided hair and infants strapped to their backs, children with Qur'anic boards tucked under their arms, old men in prayer caps and long robes.
I put the baby in her cot, where she was instantly lulled to sleep by the sounds of the call to prayer that rang out across the old city, and took my book to the terrace to enjoy the first of what was to be many "little" glasses of wine.
Shooting 26 searchlights 10km into the skies, and blaring its call to prayer 7km across the valley, the Abraj al-Bait is also the world's second tallest building.
Along the western flank of the city are the first towers of the Jabal Omar development, a sprawling complex that will eventually accommodate 100,000 people in 26 luxury hotels – sitting on another gargantuan plinth of 4,000 shops and 500 restaurants, along with its own six-storey prayer hall.
Thomas Ryan was kneeling down, whispering a prayer into the ears of another dying man when he was himself shot.
We said a prayer and we lay down, but we didn't sleep.
But the road was calling, just as it had done yesterday, when neither of us had wanted to leave Dar Ayniwen, a beautiful house in Marrakech's Palmeraie suburb, where we had lazed on the terrace and sipped gin and tonics as the call to prayer echoed through the dusk.
The poll tax was fought by cabinet ministers who had supported every deregulation, and trialling it on the Scots answered every SNP prayer.
The Daily Star continues: After the prayer, Assad was shown [on state TV] spending time with other worshippers, greeting and chatting with some of them.
As for faith itself, we hardly give a prayer for the power of prayer – only 6% of people confess to being churchgoing (and the figures do not show how many of those attend to access a food bank…).
