■ United Kingdom
Reporter tackles Tory leader
A journalist presented a file to Britain's parliamentary watchdog yesterday suggesting that the leader of the opposition Conservative Party wrongly employed his wife. Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said in a statement that he had done nothing wrong. Michael Crick, an investigative journalist for the BBC, presented his file to the commissioner for parliamentary standards, Sir Philip Mawer. Crick says he has assembled documentation questioning whether Betsy Duncan Smith did the work for which she was paid from her husband's Parliamentary allowance. She was on his payroll for 15 months. "I have also instructed my lawyers to review the press reports with a view to taking legal action," Duncan Smith said in a statement.
■ Serbia
Wedding guests down plane
A two-seater sports plane on an unauthorized joyride was apparently shot down by mistake when it flew over a Serbian wedding party where guests were firing guns into the air, local media reported. Two men were reported to have been seriously hurt when their aircraft burst into flames and crashed near Kraljevo, central Serbia. "I heard shots from a wedding party which was very close to the crash site. Then I saw the plane in flames. It was shot in the left wing. A few moments later, while attempting a crash landing, it was caught in overhead power cables," witness Zoran Vukadinovic said. Local media said neither of the men held a pilot's licence.
■ Italy
Snake terrorizes airliner
A runaway snake which worked its way loose from cabin luggage terrorized passengers aboard a Qatar Airways flight as it was about to land at Rome's Fiumicino airport, passengers said on Sunday. Witnesses said the metre-long reptile escaped from a passenger's hand luggage and slithered its way along the overhead luggage bins towards the front of the plane. The owner of the snake tried to assure his fellow passengers that the pet was harmless, but rose from his seat to capture it when other passengers became alarmed, they said.
■ Cyprus
Briton tries to swim 320km
A Briton who tried to swim almost 320km from Cyprus to Israel ended up in hospital with hypothermia, Cypriot police said. The 39-year-old was rescued by yachtsmen off the southeast of the Mediterranean island. "He told police he was trying to swim to Jerusalem from Protaras," a police spokeswoman said, referring to a popular tourist resort on the southeastern coast. The unidentified man had set off travelling light with a just a passport, but he said he lost that at sea. He did not say why he wanted to go to Jerusalem.
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