■ UNITED STATES
Mentally ill man charged
A man with a history of mental illness was charged with murder and battery on Monday in the slaying of an Illinois pastor and the stabbing of two parishioners who tackled him to the floor during Sunday morning services. Terry Sedlacek, 27, was the subject of a profile last year in the St. Louis Post Dispatch about how Lyme disease had attacked his brain. His mother told the paper at the time that Sedlacek became ill when he was in high school after being bitten by an infected tick. Police said they are not sure why Sedlacek walked into First Baptist Church on Sunday morning and shot head pastor Fred Winters, whose bible deflected one bullet and exploded in what shocked parishioners described as “confetti.”
■ IRAQ
Iran, Iraq dispute border
Iraq and Iran are seriously at odds on defining their land and sea borders, Baghdad’s foreign minister said in comments on Monday that showed the neighbors, despite improved ties, have not resolved old tensions. “We have very big problems with the Iranian side with setting and drawing the land, sea and coastal borders,” the minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, told Iraqi television station al-Sharqiya. “We also have problems with the Shatt al-Arab channel,” he said. A dispute over the two countries’ border and over control of the strategic Shatt al-Arab waterway, known in Iran as Arvand Rud, helped trigger the Iran-Iraq war, which killed an estimated 1 million people from 1980 to 1988. Shatt al-Arab, which joins the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and empties into the Gulf below Iraq’s port city of Basra, is Iraq’s only shipping outlet.
■ VENEZUELA
Chavez closes cadaver show
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has closed an exhibition of dissected cadavers in Caracas and confiscated the contents because, he said, it reflects “moral decomposition.” The traveling show, Bodies Revealed, has stirred controversy in other countries for displaying 14 full-body human specimens and more than 200 organs. “We are in the midst of something macabre,” Chavez said on his weekly TV show on Sunday. “They are human bodies. Human bodies! This is a really clear sign of the huge moral decomposition that is hitting our planet.” Shocked by a newspaper report about the show’s arrival in Venezuela’s capital, the president last week ordered action. The tax agency Seniat and Venezuela’s version of the FBI swooped on its opening day, evicted 400 visitors and carted away exhibits. The authorities will investigate if the displays were illegally declared in customs as made of plastic. Bodies Revealed uses a technique known as polymer preservation, involving embalming, dissection, dehydration and injections of liquid silicone. Debates over the origin of the bodies, which are Chinese, and whether donors gave permission, have fueled controversy elsewhere.
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