■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.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of