UNITED KINGDOM
Embassies cough up fines
The embassies of Kazakhstan and Nigeria in London have paid parking fines of £40,000 (US$65,000) ahead of a government report naming and shaming foreign missions for unpaid penalties, a council said on Wednesday. Westminster City Council said it was writing to the heads of state of countries who still have not paid up, including US President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Kazakh embassy was the worst offender on the council’s list, but it has now coughed up £37,160 for 627 parking tickets built up from 2007 to last year, the council said in a statement. The Nigerian embassy, meanwhile, paid £3,450 for clocking up 78 parking tickets. The worst remaining offenders are the embassies of China, Turkey, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and Cyprus, who collectively owe £72,880. Foreign embassies in London still owe the council a total of £1.1 million. “Citing ‘diplomatic immunity’ as an excuse for not paying tickets is clearly unacceptable,” said Lee Rowley, the council’s Cabinet member for parking. “It’s time these diplomats started to respect the rules of the road in the UK and stopped thinking they can do what they like at the expense of our taxpayers.”
GERMANY
Elephants surprise passersby
Two runaway circus elephants surprised passersby and police by showing up at a bus stop during a brief bid for freedom, officials in Hannover said. Dunia, a 40-year-old Indian elephant, and her counterpart Daela, a 25-year-old African elephant, were apprehended by police near the western city of Hannover last weekend nonchalantly munching on tree leaves and looking for all the world as if they were waiting for a bus. The pair had escaped from their enclosure at a nearby traveling circus and walked about 50m to the bus stop, police said. “It was simply an unlucky situation for the circus,” Hannover police spokesman Heiko Steiner said. “The two elephants were quite cooperative and peaceful. Everyone was amused.” If the two were trying to make an escape, they were not going far, Steiner said. The police station is only a stone’s throw from the bus stop, which is out of use during the summer school holidays.
SPAIN
Body found in undercarriage
Authorities at Madrid’s airport found the body of a Cuban man in the undercarriage of a plane that arrived from Havana on Wednesday, police said. The man “probably died from being crushed” after apparently hiding in the rear landing gear of the Iberia flight before it left Cuba, but an autopsy would determine the exact cause of death, a source in the Civil Guard police force said. Spanish media said the man had injuries to his head and chest.
KENYA
Stinky feet help fight malaria
The smell of stinky feet may help scientists fight malaria-causing mosquitoes. Bed nets and indoor spraying have already substantially reduced the number of fatal malaria cases, but so far scientists have not come up with a good way to help combat mosquitoes outdoors. Fredros Okumu, the head of a research project at Tanzania’s Ifakara Health Institute, says that traps scented with the odor of human feet may be the answer as they attract four times as many mosquitoes as a human volunteer. The mosquitoes who fly into the trap are then poisoned. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada said on Wednesday they are giving Okumu US$775,000 to create an affordable trap that could be used outside homes.
UNITED STATES
Stepmom pleads not guilty
A California woman pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to a child endangerment charge in the case of her 10-year-old stepson, who is accused of fatally shooting his white supremacist father. Krista McCary also pleaded not guilty to four counts of criminal storage of a gun, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County district attorney’s office. McCary was charged after her neo-Nazi husband Jeff Hall was shot to death in their home on May 1. Authorities say the eldest of Hall’s five children took his parents’ gun off a shelf and shot him in the ear while he was sleeping. According to a police declaration filed in the case, McCary told investigators that Hall hit, kicked and yelled at his son to punish him, had been violent against her and pushed and spanked the boy’s younger sisters. The boy was due to appear in juvenile court July 22.
UNITED STATES
Intervene on obesity: doctors
The government should have the right to remove severely obese children from their parents’ home and place them in foster care, two doctors argued in a controversial editorial published on Wednesday. “State intervention may serve the best interests of many children with life-threatening obesity, comprising the only realistic way to control harmful behaviors,” wrote Lindsey Murtagh of the Harvard School of Public Health and David Ludwig of Children’s Hospital in Boston. “In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable from a legal standpoint because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems.”
UNITED STATES
Inmate allowed child porn
A legal loophole is allowing a Washington state man accused of child sex crimes to view child pornography in jail. Weldon Marc Gilbert is acting as his own lawyer in the case, and that means he is entitled to review the evidence. The evidence in the case includes more than 100 videos seized from Gilbert’s Lake Tapps home after his 2007 arrest. Authorities say some of the footage was shot by Gilbert. The materials normally would be contraband at the Pierce County Jail, but restricting Gilbert’s access to the videos could result in a mistrial, the station reported on Wednesday. Gilbert worked as a pilot and is accused of using offers of flying lessons, money and alcohol to lure more than a dozen boys to his home, where police say he then molested them.
UNITED STATES
Mother’s grave misplaced
Evelyn and Hortense Edwards spent two decades visiting what they thought was their mother’s grave only to discover it contained the remains of a stranger. Now, the sisters are seeking US$25 million in damages from the Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, for emotional distress caused when they learned that their mother, Beatrice Williams, had been buried in the wrong plot. “It was devastating for them,” Mark Crawford, the sisters’ attorney, said in a telephone interview. He said they only discovered the mix-up after they complained to the cemetery about their mother’s grave falling into disrepair. An employee looked up the plot in question. “She said, ‘There’s a man buried there,’ and they said, ‘What do you mean there’s a man buried there?’” Crawford said. The complaint says the cemetery has acknowledged that the plot location in the sisters’ paperwork was incorrect. In a letter sent to the sisters last July, the cemetery said it believed their mother was in fact buried in another section, the complaint said.
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