■BELARUS
President rigged vote
President Alexander Lukashenko has admitted rigging the last presidential election — because his popularity is so vast that the true margin of victory was unbelievable and had to be lowered, he said. Lukashenko said in an interview published on Thursday by the Russian daily Izvestia that he took 93 percent of the vote in the 2006 polls, but he had the number reduced for “psychological” reasons. “I gave the order for it to be not 93 percent, but something around 80, I can’t remember how much,” he said. Official results had Lukashenko winning 83 percent of the vote in the election that was condemned as undemocratic by Western election observers.
■NETHERLANDS
Moon rock a fake
The Dutch national museum said on Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by US astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood. Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum would keep it anyway as a curiosity. The museum acquired the rock after the death of former prime minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969, from then-US ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts, part of their “Giant Leap” goodwill tour after the first moon landing. Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch NOS news that he had gotten it from the US State Department, but couldn’t recall the exact details.
■SOUTH AFRICA
Bishop ‘raped’ daughters
A bishop was arrested on Thursday for raping his three daughters aged nine, 17 and 18 at their home in the Vaal Triangle region, police said. “It is alleged that he has been raping his children since 2006 and threatened to kill them if they reported him,” a police spokesman told the news agency SAPA. The bishop’s wife reported the rape of the nine-year-old after the child complained of pains and admitted under questioning that her father had raped her. The older girls then told of their ordeal. Police declined to reveal the name of the bishop’s ATTACK: The Saudi wing of al-Qaeda said it was behind the blast. The bomber was the only casualty, while the prince suffered minor injurieschurch but said he was to appear at a magistrate’s court in Vereeniging yesterday to face three counts of rape.
■GERMANY
Roman horse head unveiled
Archeologists on Thursday unveiled a bronze and gold horse’s head they said was believed to be a remnant of a 2,000-year-old Roman statue. A team digging at a former Roman town near Waldgirmes in central Germany found the life-sized head along with the foot of a rider on Aug. 12. “This bronze sculpture counts among the best pieces to have ever been found from the area of the former Roman empire,” Hesse State Minister for Science Eva Kuehne-Hoermann said at the unveiling in Frankfurt. Experts say the statue dates from around 3 BC or 4 BC when the Roman outpost was set up and probably depicts the Emperor Augustus.
■ITALY
Ban on Blue Grotto lifted
Officials in Capri have lifted a ban on visits to the island’s Blue Grotto. Capri Environment Commissioner Alessandro Esposito said on Thursday that tests of the cave’s sparkling blue waters found they were fine and had “absolutely no pollution.” Samples of the water were analyzed after a fisherman reported a nauseating smell and an unexplained whitish foam in the grotto. Earlier this month, police found that raw cesspool sewage was being dumped into the waters.
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