ROME: Fresh Flesh Summer has long meant open season for Italy's paparazzi to shoot famous females in various stages of undress. This summer they turned the gender tables and began to snap males sans shorts. Among those exposed in the pages of the popular press: Centrist Party leader Pierferdinando Casini changing into his bathing suit, football star Gianluca Vialli running naked, and philosopher Stefano Bonaga boating au naturel. Many men are outraged. "I feel stabbed in the back," complained comedian Roberto Benigni, who was snapped urinating alfresco. "To pee in the bush is fantastic-but also an intimate act."

LIMA: President vs. Church Embarking on his second term last month, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori immediately locked horns with the Roman Catholic Church over birth control-and he appears to be winning. Although 90% of Peruvians are Catholic, pollsters say a whopping 93% approve of the President's push to promote access to family-planning materials and counseling for the poor, despite the church's vociferous opposition. "Practically everyone supports birth control, but it took the President's standing up to the church to make them admit it," said Eduardo Arrarte, president of Lima Tours.

CORUMBIARA: Deadly Eviction Land disputes are commonplace in Brazil and often end in violence. But a clash between police and squatters near this Amazon town was a ghastly bloodbath even by local standards. Fighting broke out when 187 heavily armed police wearing bulletproof vests showed up to evict 700 peasants from unused private woodland, where they had been camping in an attempt to stake a claim for a plot of their own. At least nine squatters, including a six-year-old girl, were killed; several were shot from behind at close range. Of 54 wounded peasants taken to hospitals in neighboring towns, many had been brutally beaten. Two officers were killed and 11 injured. Though it will be weeks before an investigation is completed, the state military-police chief and the land-reform secretary were abruptly fired. Urging President Fernando Enrique Cardoso to fulfill his promise to provide land to 40,000 families by the end of the year, legislator Nilmrio Miranda, who heads the congressional human-rights commission, warned, "We want to make sure that massacres like this don't happen again."

VELLORE: Great Escape The Tamil Tigers-the separatists from Sri Lanka accused of assassinating former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi-are notoriously ruthless fighters. So when 43 Tigers staged a dramatic prison break in India's Tamil Nadu state, it caused panic. The escapees, charged with entering India illegally, crawled through a 50-m tunnel that investigators say must have taken 20 days to dig. They surfaced outside the prison wall, swam a 15-m-wide moat and vanished. Their disappearance went unnoticed until 10 hours later, when police questioned 12 of the fleeing Tigers in Madras, 120 km away. At week's end, despite a huge manhunt, 31 remained at large. The debacle was embarrassing for Tamil Nadu's chief minister, former film queen Jayalalitha Jayaram, who was elected in 1991 after promising to crack down on the Tigers. Quipped G. Vishwanathan, a Vellore resident and former state minister: "When people elected Jayalalitha, they hardly expected her to give live performances of film plots like The Great Escape."