■ Italy
Four held for coin-scooping
Italian police arrested four street cleaners Monday as they tried to pocket hundreds of euros scooped from Rome's famed Fountain of Trevi. Each day, thousands of tourists stand with their backs to the Renaissance masterpiece and throw coins over their shoulders into its shallow basin in a tradition which is supposed to ensure they return to Rome. The money, which adds up to several hundred euros a day or more, is regularly swept out by a cleaning firm with half of the proceeds handed over to Roman Catholic charity Caritas.
■ United States
Phone-bandit suspect caught
The FBI on Tuesday arrested a 19-year-old woman suspected of robbing four Virginia banks while apparently talking on her mobile phone, local media said. Candice Martinez was captured at 3:40am in Centreville, Virginia, after an FBI agent spotted a car linked to the Washington-area robberies, FBI spokeswoman Debbie Weirman told a CBS television affiliate. The woman who robbed the banks was filmed by security cameras casually walking up to the teller and handing over a note while holding a cellphone to her ear the whole time. Weirman said authorities were flooded with tips after the robber's face was broadcast across the nation.
■ Senegal
Former Chad leader arrested
Chad's former president Hissene Habre was arrested and taken into custody yesterday in Senegal, under an international warrant issued in Belgium over mass killings and torture when he was in power, the justice minister and lawyers said. Habre, who is accused of atrocities committed by his 1982-1990 regime and has lived in exile in Senegal since 1990, "was arrested this morning," Demba Cire Bathily, a spokesman for the Senegalese Coalition for the Extradition of Hissene Habre to Belgium, told reporters. The former warlord turned head of state in the northern central African country appeared before the Court of Appeal in Dakar, which is set to rule on whether extradition to Belgium is possible.
■ Italy
Abortions to be discouraged
The government is considering putting pro-life activists into state-funded abortion advice centers to discourage women from terminations. The move follows a dispute over the growing use in Italy of the abortion pill, Mifepristone. Health minister, Francesco Storace said he was planning a shake-up of the advice centers to make sure they included Roman Catholic volunteers. He said the 1978 law was "not just to legalize abortion but to prevent it." Pro-choice campaigners have been fearing an assault on abortion legislation since a majority of MPs brought in a law that gave embryos full rights.
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