BAGHDAD, Sept 29, 2007 (AFP) - The UN's culture body said on Saturday that work would begin next month on rebuilding a Shiite shrine whose destruction in a bombing last year unleashed a wave of bitter sectarian violence across Iraq.

'Reconstruction of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra shall start after the end of Ramadan (mid-October) and preparations and training have been completed,' UNESCO's Mohammed Jalil told a press conference in Baghdad.

BEIRUT, Sept 10, 2007 (AFP) - Watched over by guards, workers lay concrete blocks for brand new housing to replace Hezbollah's former command quarters, destroyed by Israeli air strikes last year in Beirut's southern suburbs.

A year after the devastating war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, the Shiite Muslim bastion has been turned into a vast construction site, criss-crossed by trucks carrying cement.

SAMASTIPUR, India, Aug 14, 2007 (AFP) - Dukhia Manjhi returned to his shelter in despair after a first visit to his village since it was swamped by the area's worst floods in decades revealed how little the waters had left.

'Nothing -- there's nothing to go back to,' said Manhji, housed in one of thousands of plastic-covered huts in Bihar state, where the floods affected some 15 million people according to official figures.

'The floods have washed away the fertile soil and there's nothing to rebuild our home.'