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World News Quick Take

■UNITED STATES

Violinist to play for cabbies

Grammy-nominated violinist Philippe Quint said on Monday he would play a private 30-minute performance at Newark Liberty International Airport’s cab waiting area in New Jersey yesterday to thank the Egyptian-born cab driver that reunited him with his lost Stradivarius. Mohamed Khalil and his family will also have tickets to Quint’s next New York performance in September at Carnegie Hall. The 1723 violin was left in Khalil’s cab on April 21 and returned the next day.



■UNITED STATES

Segregation law abolished

The south Texas town of Edcouch has abolished a 77-year-old anti-Hispanic segregation law. The Board of Aldermen voted unanimously voted on Monday to abolish an ordinance that banned “Spanish or Mexican” residents who were not servants or maids from occupying “any building on the American side or portion” of the once-divided town. When the rule was enacted on Dec. 9, 1931, a virtual line was drawn through the center of the city. The town is now largely Hispanic.



■BRAZIL

Ferry death toll rises

Amazon region rescue workers found two more bodies on Monday around a remote jungle town near where a boat ferrying people from a religious festival sank on Saturday. The discovery raised the death toll to 17, with dozens still missing. The Comandante Sales ferryboat had no passenger list and authorities do not know how many people were aboard. It may have been carrying more than 100, and as many as 30 could still be missing, a navy official said.



■BRAZIL

Guards shoot Indians

Armed guards protecting a farmer’s rice fields on Monday shot and wounded 10 Indians who were building their homes on a reservation, police and an indigenous rights group said. Federal agents were sent to the Raposa Serra do Sol reservation in Roraima state to prevent further violence. “Hired gunmen” riding a pickup truck and five motorcycles surrounded the Indians and started shooting “to prevent them from building their homes on land that belongs to them,” the Roraima Indigenous Council said in a statement. The council said the gunmen were employees of rice farmer Paulo Cesar Quartiero, who told federal police that the Indians were building houses on his property and that his men acted in self-defense.



■CUBA

Vesco reportedly dead

Robert Vesco, the US fugitive who cooked up moneymaking schemes that allegedly involved everyone from Colombian drug lords to the families of US presidents, reportedly died and was buried almost six months ago, a burial record at Havana’s Colon Cemetery shows. The record shows that a 71-year-old man with the same name and birthdate as Vesco died on Nov. 23 from lung cancer and was buried the next day. US officials said they had no word of his death.



■UNITED STATES

Being leggy has advantages

Leggy women and gangly men are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s, according to a study that suggests a healthy upbringing protects against the disease. Researchers took limb measurements of 2,798 men and women with an average age of 72 and monitored them for five years. At the end of the study 480 had developed Alzheimer’s or other dementia. Women with longer legs had a much lower risk of dementia, with every extra inch of leg reducing their risk by 16 percent.

■UNITED KINGDOM

Posters address prostitution

Posters were to appear in clubs and pubs from Monday warning men against paying for sex in brothels with exploited or trafficked women. The posters, which will be piloted in men’s toilets in Westminster and Nottingham, will say “Walk in a Punter. Walk out a Rapist.” They are part of a six-month home office review into tackling the demand for prostitution, which began in January, and aim to point out that trafficked women are forced into selling sex, and that forced sex is rape. “So if you pay for sex with a trafficked woman what does that make you?” the posters ask.



■EGYPT

Migrant killed at border

Police shot dead a Nigerian migrant and wounded four Sudanese who tried to slip across the desert border from Ismailia into Israel yesterday, security sources said. The death of the 25-year-old Nigerian man, who was shot in the neck, brings the number of migrants killed in escalating violence at the border this year to 12. Scores of others, mostly from Africa, have been detained. The wounded Sudanese migrants include an 18-year-old woman who was shot in the abdomen and three Sudanese men ages 25 to 32, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.



■GERMANY

Babies found in freezer

A 44-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of killing her own babies after her grown children found the bodies of three infants stashed in the family’s freezer when looking for a frozen pizza, police said. Police on Monday confirmed the grisly find the night before in the town of Wenden, near Olpe, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia after the woman turned herself in, officials said. The three infants are believed to have been born alive, but authorities were awaiting autopsy results to determine how they died, said Johannes Daheim, a spokesman for prosecutors investigating the case.



■FRANCE

Authorities track pedophile

Interpol yesterday launched a global appeal to identify a Western man suspected of sexually abusing several Asian boys and distributing hundreds of photos of the acts on the Internet. It is the second time in seven months that the Lyon-based agency took such a step following an unprecedented public appeal to identify another pedophile, Christopher Paul Neil, a 32-year-old Canadian, who was arrested in Thailand in October. Interpol yesterday posted six images on its website of the man who is thought to have abused three boys aged between six and 10, all of whom appear to be Asian.



■POLAND

Kuwaiti holds teens hostage

An intoxicated man from Kuwait, claiming he had a bomb, briefly held three Jewish teenagers captive in their room in a Polish hotel where they were staying for Holocaust commemoration ceremonies, police said. The three 16-year-old Brazilians — originally identified as Israelis — were pulled into a sixth-floor room of Warsaw’s Holiday Inn after 9am on Monday by a 23-year-old identified as Mohammad A, said national police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski. Witnesses alerted hotel guards, who rushed to the site but called police when the Kuwaiti said he had explosives, Warsaw police spokesman Marcin Szyndler, said. Police stormed the room just before 10am and took the suspect into custody without incident, Sokolowski said. None of the captives was harmed and police found no explosives.

■UNITED STATES

Violinist to play for cabbies

Grammy-nominated violinist Philippe Quint said on Monday he would play a private 30-minute performance at Newark Liberty International Airport’s cab waiting area in New Jersey yesterday to thank the Egyptian-born cab driver that reunited him with his lost Stradivarius. Mohamed Khalil and his family will also have tickets to Quint’s next New York performance in September at Carnegie Hall. The 1723 violin was left in Khalil’s cab on April 21 and returned the next day.



■UNITED STATES

Segregation law abolished

The south Texas town of Edcouch has abolished a 77-year-old anti-Hispanic segregation law. The Board of Aldermen voted unanimously voted on Monday to abolish an ordinance that banned “Spanish or Mexican” residents who were not servants or maids from occupying “any building on the American side or portion” of the once-divided town. When the rule was enacted on Dec. 9, 1931, a virtual line was drawn through the center of the city. The town is now largely Hispanic.



■BRAZIL

Ferry death toll rises

Amazon region rescue workers found two more bodies on Monday around a remote jungle town near where a boat ferrying people from a religious festival sank on Saturday. The discovery raised the death toll to 17, with dozens still missing. The Comandante Sales ferryboat had no passenger list and authorities do not know how many people were aboard. It may have been carrying more than 100, and as many as 30 could still be missing, a navy official said.



■BRAZIL

Guards shoot Indians

Armed guards protecting a farmer’s rice fields on Monday shot and wounded 10 Indians who were building their homes on a reservation, police and an indigenous rights group said. Federal agents were sent to the Raposa Serra do Sol reservation in Roraima state to prevent further violence. “Hired gunmen” riding a pickup truck and five motorcycles surrounded the Indians and started shooting “to prevent them from building their homes on land that belongs to them,” the Roraima Indigenous Council said in a statement. The council said the gunmen were employees of rice farmer Paulo Cesar Quartiero, who told federal police that the Indians were building houses on his property and that his men acted in self-defense.



■CUBA

Vesco reportedly dead

Robert Vesco, the US fugitive who cooked up moneymaking schemes that allegedly involved everyone from Colombian drug lords to the families of US presidents, reportedly died and was buried almost six months ago, a burial record at Havana’s Colon Cemetery shows. The record shows that a 71-year-old man with the same name and birthdate as Vesco died on Nov. 23 from lung cancer and was buried the next day. US officials said they had no word of his death.



■UNITED STATES

Being leggy has advantages

Leggy women and gangly men are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s, according to a study that suggests a healthy upbringing protects against the disease. Researchers took limb measurements of 2,798 men and women with an average age of 72 and monitored them for five years. At the end of the study 480 had developed Alzheimer’s or other dementia. Women with longer legs had a much lower risk of dementia, with every extra inch of leg reducing their risk by 16 percent.




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