■BRAZIL
Jail cellphone plot foiled
Two teenagers were arrested on the weekend for allegedly plotting to smuggle cellphones into a prison using a kite, reports said on Sunday. Police said the two unidentified adolescents were arrested late on Saturday with two kites and mobile phones inside a building in Tremembe, a town outside Sao Paulo, the G1 news Web site reported. Police said the two confessed to planning the operation and said they were to have received US$175 through a former girlfriend of a prisoner in the town’s Tarcizo Leonce Pinheiro Cintra penitentiary.
■VENEZUELA
Alleged Mafia head nabbed
The alleged head of the Sicilian Mafia, Salvatore Miceli, was detained and will be deported to Italy, Interior Minister Tarek el-Aissami said on Sunday. Detained on Saturday night by police, Miceli, 63, has been wanted in Italy on drug trafficking charges since 2001, he said. “He is one of the five most wanted men in Europe for trafficking heroin, morphine and cocaine,” Aissami said. He said Venezuelan authorities have been in communication with Italian authorities to deport Miceli as soon as possible.
■ENVIRONMENT
Oceans choking with waste
The world’s seas are gradually filling with an increasing volume of waste, with plastic making up the single largest part of pollution in the marine environment, a new report by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) and the Washington-based advocacy group The Ocean Conservancy said. Plastic most often found in the form of PET bottles and shopping bags can be found floating in seas around the globe. It accounts for up to 80 percent of marine waste pollution in some waters, said the report, which was published in Washington and Nairobi to mark World Oceans Day on June 8. Smoking also plays a major role in marine pollution. The report’s researchers discovered that of the 103 million pieces of marine pollution categorized in the study, 25 million were cigarette filters or individual cigarettes.
■MEXICO
Storm forms off coast
Tropical Storm Andres formed off the coast, the first named cyclone of the eastern Pacific season, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said. The eye of Andres was 325km south of Zihuatanejo on the Mexican coast at 10pm on Sunday and moving west-northwest at 7 kilometers per hour, the NHC said in an advisory. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 65kph. A tropical storm watch, indicating winds of between 63kph and 118kph are expected within 36 hours, was in place for the Mexican coast from Zihuatanejo to Manzanillo. The storm is forecast to strengthen during the next 48 hours, the advisory said.
■HAITI
One killed amid vote
One person was killed on Sunday when supporters of rival candidates clashed as people went to the polls in a Senate election, Haiti national police (PNH) said. The victim, a woman, was killed in the southwestern city of Jeremie when violence erupted between the two groups of supporters, a PNH official there said. Sporadic violence marred the first hours of voting on Sunday, which has seen very few people turning out to the polls to elect one third of the Senate’s 30 seats in this impoverished Caribbean country. Not far from the presidential palace, protesting medical school students who have been demanding for weeks a rise in the minimum wage were met by police who threw tear gas and blocked the road.
RSS