■UNITED STATES
Patient loses fingerprints
When a cancer patient from Singapore traveled to the US last year, he discovered an unusual side effect of his medication: missing fingerprints. The 62-year-old man was taking capecitabine, or Xeloda, to treat head and neck cancer. Upon arriving in the US, immigration officials asked him for his fingerprints. But the drug had caused so much redness and peeling to his fingers that the patient, identified only as Mr S, had none. Customs officials held Mr S for four hours before deciding he was not a security threat, said a letter published yesterday in the Annals of Oncology journal. Once patients stop taking the drug and apply ice to their hands, their fingerprints will return in about a month.
■CHILE
Father accused of rape
A workman has been arrested after being accused of raping his daughter over a 14-year period and fathering four of her children, police said. Manuel Jesus Bartierra was accused by his daughter, Viviana, now 26 years old, in the latest case to echo that of Austria Josef Fritzl, who was sentenced to life in prison in March after being convicted for 24 years of abusing his daughter. Viviana said she had been repeatedly raped since she was 12, and gave birth to four children now aged four, five, seven and eight years old. Her father, a workman from an area in the north of Santiago was arrested on Monday. “We have been able to establish that she was sexually abused from the age of nine, the actual rape took place at 12 years old,” police chief Mauro Pino said. Authorities are investigating whether the man’s wife was implicated in the abuse.
■UNITED STATES
Court rules on phone drugs
The US Supreme Court says people who buy drugs over the telephone should not get more prison time than people who buy face-to-face from dealers. The court unanimously overturned a decision by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The law made it a felony to use a communication device in “committing or in causing or in facilitating” a drug purchase. Prosecutors said that Salman Khade Abuelhawa’s use of a cellphone for a misdemeanor purchase of around US$120 of cocaine fell under the statute.
■CANADA
Broadcaster reprimanded
A broadcast industry council slammed the nation’s French-language radio broadcaster for airing a comedy sketch that suggested US President Barack Obama would be easy to assassinate because as the first black American president, he would stand out against the White House. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council issued a public reprimand of Radio-Canada on Monday after the government’s regulatory agency asked the private industry council to look into the matter before it begins its own investigation. Canada’s broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, received 210 complaints about the sketch.
■IRAN
Facebook restored
Iran restored access to Facebook on Tuesday after a block on the social networking Web site last week generated accusations that the government was trying to muzzle one of the main presidential campaign tools of the reformist opposition. Facebook was cut off on Saturday, depriving challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of a critical means of reaching out for the youth vote in the June 12 election.
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