■ LEBANON
Minister sues TV anchor
Anti-Syrian minister Ahmad Fatfat said on Friday he sued a TV news anchor after she made unwitting remarks on air that he could be the next politician to be killed. While covering the bomb blast that killed anti-Syrian lawmaker Walid Eido on Wednesday, an anchor on the NBN channel of pro-Syrian Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri ridiculed the incident and said Fatfat, the sports minister, would be next. "I sued because there was an incitement and a call to an assassination on a media outlet," Fatfat said. "I am using the justice system because I consider it an excellent means of protection."
■ MOLDOVA
Separatist rejects new force
The head of the self-proclaimed independent Transdniestria region rejected on Friday the notion of a new force to uphold a fragile truce and vowed to press for full independence and union with Russia. Transdniestria, dominated by Slavs, declared independence in 1990 in Soviet times on grounds that Moldova's majority would one day opt to join up with its ethnic kin in Romania to the west. The sides fought a brief war in 1992 after the collapse of Soviet rule and were separated by Russian troops who remain in the sliver of land despite repeated promises to leave.
■ GERMANY
Modern Robin Hood jailed
A banker who stole money from rich clients to help poor ones has been sentenced to two years and 10 months in prison, a court said on Thursday. The 45-year-old, dubbed by the media as a modern day Robin Hood, diverted 2.1 million euros (US$2.79 million) to clients he felt were needy while holding a senior position at a savings bank in the southern region of Tauberfranken. "The accused undertook these actions to grant liquidity to clients who, in his view, were short of money and who no longer got loans under the usual money market conditions," a court statement said.
■ SPAIN
Beauty contest changes rules
The Miss Spain beauty contest has changed its rules to allow mothers to compete after its decision to dethrone a 22-year-old beauty queen when it emerged she had a child met with national outrage in February. Angela Bustillo, who has a toddler son, won the title of Miss Cantabria, a region on the northern coast, in January, but organizers disqualified her citing rules that contestants cannot have children. The decision sparked widespread outrage in the press and expressions of support for the dethroned queen from feminist organizations to the head of the Cantabrian local government.
■ AUSTRIA
Dead baby case solved
Police released on Friday a couple arrested for the murder of three new-born children some 30 years ago, the prosecutor's office in Innsbruck said. The bodies of the three babies were found buried in the cellar of a residential building in Innsbruck, in the western province of Tirol, earlier this month. DNA tests on the bodies showed they were the children of a woman now aged 54 who had lived in the apartment building. She told police that the babies had been stillborn between 1977 and 1980. She denied killing them, but admitted hiding their bodies under the floor in the cellar.
■ UNITED STATES
Convict wants last laugh
A convicted double murderer in Texas is holding a joke contest on the Internet so he can use the winning entry as his last words when he is sentenced to die by lethal injection on June 26. "I'll be enjoying my last days on this earth ... I want people to send me their best jokes, to keep me and the others with [execution] dates laughing," Patrick Knight, 39, told CNN in an interview from his prison on Friday. Convicted of murdering two neighbors in 1991, Knight said: "Death is my punishment, I've accepted that ... If you got to go, go with a smile."
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