■ RUSSIA
American sentenced
A Moscow court yesterday sentenced a US pastor to three years in prison for illegally bringing hunting ammunition into the country. Phillip Miles was arrested in a Moscow airport on Feb. 3 after customs officials found a box with 20 rounds of undeclared hunting ammunition in his luggage. Miles said at the time it was a present for his friend, a pastor from the Urals city of Perm. A judge ruled that the 52-year-old pastor from South Carolina will spend three years and two months in a prison camp. Interfax news agency quoted Miles as saying he regretted violating Russian law, but he also called his sentence “severe.”
■ MEXICO
Oil fight triggers ad row
A political row over an oil reform plan intensified over the weekend as a TV ad compared a firebrand leftist leading a siege of Congress to 20th century dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Funded by a businessman angry at a 10-day blockade of Congress by opposition left-wing lawmakers, the ad says the antics of protest leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are endangering democracy. Leftists are blocking a government proposal to lower barriers to private investment in the oil sector, controlled by the state since 1938. “Who shuts congresses? In 1933, Adolf Hitler in Germany. In 1939, Benito Mussolini in Italy. In 1973, Augusto Pinochet of Chile,” the ad says.
■ UNITED STATES
Bottle plea lands at NASA
A Bahamian girl’s seaborne school project has landed on the sandy doorstep of NASA in Titusville, Florida. United Space Alliance worker Jill Vogel found a message in a bottle from a student at the Holy Name Catholic School in Bimini while volunteering for a beach cleanup near the Kennedy Space Center. Vogel and her colleagues have collected space memorabilia to send to the nine-year-old girl and her classmates.
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