■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.
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