■UNITED STATES
Organ swindler admits guilt
A man accused of swindling desperately ill patients out of US$400,000 by making false promises of organ transplants in the Philippines has pleaded guilty in New York to five federal wire fraud charges. Jerome Feldman pleaded guilty on Friday before a District Court judge in Utica. He faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to US$250,000 on each of the five counts. Prosecutors said Feldman’s victims traveled to the Philippines based on his promises they would receive organ transplants there. One died while awaiting a promised liver transplant. Feldman never arranged the transplants and kept the money.
■UNITED STATES
Gucci sues over fakes
Gucci America sued several credit card processing companies for trademark infringement on Thursday on grounds those companies facilitated the sale of counterfeit Gucci bags on the Internet. Gucci America said in the lawsuit filed in District Court in Manhattan that by processing transactions on counterfeits, the companies “not only supply the necessary marketplace for such transactions, they are full partners in those counterfeiting activities.”
■UNITED STATES
Tony Curtis comes clean
It was while filming Some Like It Hot in 1958 that Tony Curtis made his infamous remark that shooting a love scene with co-star Marilyn Monroe was “like kissing Hitler.” But in a new memoir, Curtis alleges that the two actors were lovers at the time, and that their affair resulted in Monroe’s pregnancy — although she later suffered a miscarriage. In The Making of Some Like It Hot, which is due for publication in September, Curtis, now 84, says that the couple, who enjoyed a brief relationship in 1949, grew close again while on set. “What I experienced with her was unforgettable,” he says. Both were married at the time, he to Janet Leigh and she to the playwright Arthur Miller. It was, Curtis says, when they were admitting their affair to Miller that Monroe broke the news of her pregnancy. “I was stunned,” Curtis writes. “I just stood there. The room was so silent that I could hear tires screeching on Santa Monica Boulevard.” Curtis says he was told to finish the film and stay away from Miller and Monroe, and it was only after filming had finished that he learned of Monroe’s miscarriage. Curtis’s marriage to Janet Leigh, with whom he had two daughters, ended in 1962. In 2002, Curtis told the British gay magazine Attitude that when he first arrived in Hollywood in 1948, “I had more action than Mount Vesuvius; men, women, animals!” At a Guardian interview at the British Film Institute in London last year, Curtis explained the genesis of the “kissing Hitler” remark. “Someone said to me, ‘Hey, what’s it like kissing Marilyn?’ I said, ‘It’s like kissing Hitler. What are you doing asking me such a stupid question?’ That’s where it came from.”
■CANADA
Divers find WWII plane
Divers have stumbled upon what they believe is the wreckage of a US Army air force amphibious plane that went down in the St Lawrence River in 1942. The government divers, who work for Parks Canada, announced on Thursday that they came across the wreck while doing routine work near the village of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan in eastern Quebec. It has not yet been confirmed whether it is the lost plane. The US military considers the potential discovery a major find.
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