■LIBERIA
Taylor says witness ‘crazy’
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor said on Tuesday that a key prosecution witness at his war crimes trial was a low-level official who “went crazy” years before testifying against him. Taylor used his fifth day on the witness stand at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague to try to discredit witness Varmuyan Sherif. Sherif said last year he saw Taylor smuggle weapons and ammunition to rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone in rice sacks in defiance of an arms embargo. He also accused Taylor of using child soldiers in fighting formations called Small Boys Units. But Taylor insisted Sherif was responsible only for his presidential motorcade and later “lost his mind.” “He went crazy,” Taylor said. “Varmuyan was on the streets, naked and eating from garbage.”
■ITALY
Dozens arrested over drugs
Police on Tuesday arrested 49 people who were allegedly part of an international ring involved in smuggling drugs from Latin America into Europe, officials said. Most of the suspects were picked up in and around Milan during several dawn raids. Many of those arrested are believed to belong to crime families of the ’Ndrangheta, the local version of the mafia in Italy’s southern Calabria region. Thirteen foreign nationals, including nationals from Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Romania, Albania and Montenegro were also among those apprehended, police said.
■IRAN
Two murderers hanged
Two men convicted of murder have been hanged in executions carried out in prison in the city of Isfahan, the Etemad newspaper reported yesterday. The men were only identified by their first names as Esmail, 23, who was found guilty of strangling a 19-year-old woman, and Muslim, 28, who had stabbed a friend to death, the report said.
■TURKEY
Man, sons kill six
A man and two of his sons opened fire at random on Tuesday, killing six people and wounding seven, an official said. The assailants fired their shotguns on their neighbors in the village of Karaali, said Muammer Musmal, governor of Elazig Province. Three of the wounded were in critical condition, he said. The motive of the attack was not clear, but the governor said the assailants were said to be mentally disturbed.
■CANADA
Natives 22% of prisoners
The country’s native population accounts for 22 percent of prisoners, despite making up only 3 percent of the country’s population, according to figures released by the government on Tuesday. The disproportionate representation of natives, who include American Indians, Inuits and mixed-race Aboriginals, is worst in prisons in western Canada, particularly in Saskatchewan province. According to the analysis by Statistics Canada, 81 percent of prisoners in Saskatchewan province are natives, though only 11 percent of the province’s inhabitants come from indigenous communities. The situation is only slightly better in Manitoba, where natives make up 69 percent of prisoners and around 12 percent of the province’s residents. In Quebec, natives account for less than 2 percent of the prison population and around 1 percent of the province as a whole. The analysis found that age, educational background and employment status were factors that contributed to the native incarceration rate, but said that the rate remained higher for natives than non-natives, even where figures were controlled for those factors.
■BOLIVIA
Farmworker killed by ants
Police said a 42-year-old man who fell asleep under an ant-infested tree was killed by insect bites. Beni city Police Chief Rolando Ramos said that farmworker Santiago Ortiz apparently had been drinking before sitting down beneath a Palo Santo tree, known for its aromatic wood and for hosting a particularly aggressive sort of ant. Ramos said on Tuesday that when police reached the scene, the man was already dead, but swarms of ants were still crawling across his body.
■MEXICO
Suspected killer detained
Police have detained a woman in the deaths of two professional wrestlers who were found drugged in a low-rent hotel in Mexico City, prosecutors said on Tuesday. The 65-year-old suspect was one of two women caught on surveillance video leaving the victims’ hotel room, prosecutors said in a statement. The statement said an autopsy on the two diminutive wrestlers, who were brothers, detected a substance found in eye drops that can damage the nervous system when mixed with alcohol.
■BRAZIL
5,000 kids killed each year
Five thousand adolescents a year are killed in the country, most of them poor and uneducated black males, a joint study released on Tuesday by UNICEF, the government and a slum-monitoring group said. “The majority are at risk of death because of the drug trade, generally for being users, not dealers,” Undersecretary for Human Rights Carmem Oliveira said. The study, Index of Homicides in Adolescence, showed that two in every 1,000 Brazilian children aged 12 will die before reaching 19. Oliveira said the murder rate was 30 times that experienced in European countries. She said homicide was the cause of adolescent death in 45 percent of cases, followed by natural causes in 25 percent of cases and accidents in 22 percent of cases.
■UNITED STATES
Sutherland freed of charges
Kiefer Sutherland’s legal troubles for allegedly head-butting a fashion designer in a New York City nightclub are over. The Manhattan district attorney’s spokeswoman said on Tuesday that misdemeanor assault charges against the actor were being dropped because the alleged victim would not cooperate with prosecutors. The star of the Fox TV show 24 was charged in May after designer Jack McCollough said Sutherland head-butted him and broke his nose in a Manhattan nightclub. Sutherland and McCollough issued a joint statement a few weeks later saying they had resolved their differences. Sutherland apologized to McCollough in the statement.
■UNITED STATES
Same-name couple to wed
This October, Kelly Hildebrandt will vow to share her life with a man who already shares her name. The romance of Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, 20, and Kelly Carl Hildebrandt, 24, was a match made in cyberspace. She was curious and bored one night last year, so she plugged her name into the popular social networking Web site Facebook just to see if anyone shared it. At the time, Kelly Hildebrandt, of Lubbock, Texas, was the only match. So she sent him a message. For the next three months the two exchanged e-mails. Before he knew it, occasional phone calls turned into daily chats. He visited her in Florida after a few months and “fell head over heels.” Months after Kelly Hildebrandt sent her first e-mail, she found a diamond engagement ring hidden in treasure box on a beach in December. They plan to make their home in South Florida.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese