■SPAIN
Expats on crime watch
British expats visiting Spain on Wednesday were urged to be on the lookout for some of their country’s most wanted criminals who are suspected to be hiding out in the Mediterranean nation. The British crime-fighting charity Crimestoppers and the Serious Organized Crime Agency made the appeal at a press conference in the southern city of Malaga in which they added 10 new names to their existing list of 17 suspects believed to be on the run in the country. The 27 include drug traffickers, child abusers, rapists and murderers. Since Crimestoppers began operations in Spain in 2006, 23 of 40 suspects have been captured.
■RUSSIA
Yeltsin story a ‘fib’
The former head of Boris Yeltsin’s security on Wednesday dismissed as “fibs” a journalist’s claim that the former Russian president was found drunk and looking for pizza near the White House in 1995. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch made the allegation in the USA Today newspaper as he was promoting his book detailing Bill Clinton’s presidency, parsed from hours of secret recordings with the former president. Yeltsin had been staying at Blair House, meters from the White House, when he was discovered late at night roaming by secret service agents, dressed in his underwear, Taylor said. When confronted trying to hail a taxi, Yeltsin slurred that he was looking for pizza. “That never happened,” said Alexandre Korjakov, now a member of parliament. “Abroad, Boris had such security that he couldn’t have looked for a taxi alone. It’s all fibs,” he said. Yeltsin, who died in 2007, is remembered for several embarrassing drunken incidents, once seizing the baton from a bandmaster in Germany to himself conduct and playing the spoons on the president of Kyrgyzstan’s bald head.
■ITALY
Police nab mob croc
Here’s another of the Mafia’s trademark offers-you-can’t-refuse: pay or be eaten by a crocodile. An anti-Mafia police unit said on Wednesday it has seized a crocodile used by an alleged Naples mob boss to intimidate local businessmen from whom he demanded protection money. Officers searching for weapons in the man’s home outside the southern city last week found the crocodile living on his terrace, police official Sergio Di Mauro said. The crocodile, weighing 40km and 1.7m long, was fed a diet of live rabbits and mice, Di Mauro said.
■POLAND
Parliament condemns WWII
The parliament adopted a resolution on Wednesday condemning the Soviet invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. Moscow swiftly criticized the resolution as “worthless politics based on lies.” Lawmakers in Poland’s lower house, the Sejm, unanimously passed the resolution on Wednesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet attack on Poland on Sept. 17, 1939. In the resolution, they also condemned the 1940 Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and priests at Katyn. The lawmakers declared that the massacre had “the characteristics of genocide.” In Moscow, Russian lawmakers sharply criticized the resolution. Russian leaders bristle at criticism of Moscow’s World War II-era actions and reject efforts to equate the Soviet Union with Hitler’s Germany. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland in 1939 based on a secret agreement known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Polish lawmakers also condemned that, saying it made Poland “a victim of the two totalitarian systems: Nazism and Communism.”
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