RUSSIA
Patient kills plastic surgeon
A plastic surgeon died on Tuesday after a patient upset over the results of several operations gunned him down and then took his own life. The patient, 34-year-old Yury Lebedev, on Monday shot the surgeon, named in media reports as Alexander Remizov, in his office at the Russian Railways hospital in Saint Petersburg, investigators said in a statement. Lebedev was angry at the results of several nose operations and a procedure on his ears, prosecutors told local news Web site Fontanka.ru. Remizov reportedly oversaw his treatment, but did not perform the surgeries. Lebedev shot the surgeon in the chest with a hunting rifle, which he was able to bring through metal detectors at the entrance that had been switched off, the hospital’s chief doctor told journalists according to Fontanka.ru. Lebedev, who had served for 10 years as a submarine officer before moving to Saint Petersburg, had difficulties with his personal life that he blamed on his appearance, the Web site reported, citing his friends.
UNITED STATES
Hawaii statue spear found
Police officers have found the spear that was taken from King Kamehameha’s statue on Hawaii’s Big Island. The top section of the spear held in the hand of the statue was reported missing on Sunday. Officers on Tuesday returned to the scene to continue investigating when they found the missing spear section in overgrowth on the banks of a channel behind the statue. The spear had been forcibly removed from the lower staff section, officers said. Lieutenant Gregory Esteban declined to reveal how it was removed. “That’s something only the suspect or suspects would have knowledge of,” he said.
MEXICO
Big pot seizure at big top
Authorities found 4 tonnes of marijuana hidden under a circus truck. Federal police officers discovered the drugs during a routine traffic stop on a road in the northern state of Sonora, which borders the US, the National Security Commission said in a statement on Tuesday. After smelling a strong odor of marijuana, the officers found the drug hidden in a secret compartment attached to the underside of a cage-like trailer carrying two motorcycles, the statement said. Police found 389 aluminum and plastic bags of marijuana and released a picture of the massive haul lined up in front the red truck, which had the word circo (circus) written on the side in yellow.
EL SALVADOR
Mothers swap babies back
The months-long saga of two babies switched shortly after birth at an exclusive private hospital and given to the wrong mothers has ended after the infants were returned to their biological families, government officials said on Tuesday. The baby exchange took place behind closed doors at the attorney general’s building in the capital of San Salvador late on Monday. The controversy began on May 21 after Mercedes Soto gave birth to a son. The father of the child is Briton Richard Cushworth. When Soto left the hospital a few days after giving birth she noticed that the infant given to her had darker skin than she remembered from her first encounter with the newborn, eventually prompting her to seek a DNA test weeks later. The test showed that she was not the mother of the boy. The parents of the other child have not made any public statements to date while all court records containing their names have been sealed. The doctor who performed the birth, Antonio Guidos, has been named the main suspect by a judge in the case.
CHINA
Fake princess imprisoned
A farmer who pretended to be a princess descended from the Qing Dynasty to swindle people out of more than 2 million yuan (US$315,000) has been sentenced to 13-and-a-half years in prison for fraud, a court said. Wang Fengying (王鳳鷹) and her co-accused, Yang Janglin (楊江林), said she was called Princess Changping and persuaded people to lend them money to help them get back assets worth billions of dollars held by the authorities, the Lianhu District Court in Shaanxi Province said. They promised high returns on the investments and the fraud lasted two years until a victim went to the police, the court said in a statement on Tuesday. In the meantime, Wang had bought a sedan car and put a down payment on an apartment. Police seized 41 gold bars, thousands of fake dollars and treasure maps that Wang offered to investors as collateral. Yang was sentenced to 12 years and both were fined 500,000 yuan in court on Monday.
CHINA
Escaped lioness shot dead
A lioness found prowling along a motorway after apparently jumping from a moving truck has been shot dead by police officers, reports said yesterday. How the protected animal came to be on the highway in Anhui Province was not clear, but the illegal raising of endangered species is not unusual. Officers took “more than 20 shots” to kill the lioness after deciding it would take “too long” to obtain a tranquillizer gun, the anhuinews.com portal reported. The animal was thought to have jumped out of a loosely bolted cage on a truck transporting it, and was first knocked down by another truck and lamed, it said. It kept walking toward a service area and highway staff used vehicles to set up a roadblock. The standoff lasted half an hour before police officers arrived and decided to shoot the animal “to protect peoples’ lives,” the report said. No one had claimed the lioness, it added.
CHINA
‘Dark side’ probe planned
The nation’s increasingly ambitious space program plans to attempt the first-ever landing of a lunar probe on the moon’s far side, a leading engineer said. The Chang’e 4 mission is planned for sometime before 2020, Zou Yongliao (鄒永廖) from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ moon exploration department told China Central Television in an interview broadcast yesterday. Zou said the mission’s objective would be to study the geological conditions on the moon’s far side, also known as the dark side. That could eventually lead to the placement of a radio telescope for use by astronomers, something that would help “fill a void” in man’s knowledge of the universe, Zou said. Radio transmissions from Earth are unable to reach the moon’s far side, making it an excellent location for sensitive instruments.
INDIA
Maids accuse envoy of rape
Two Nepalese maids have accused a Saudi Arabian diplomat of rape and torture while they were working in his home outside New Delhi, a senior police officer said yesterday. The women, aged 30 and 50, have filed complaints with police alleging the unnamed diplomat kept them locked in his apartment where they were repeatedly abused. A police team rescued the women late on Monday from the home in the upscale satellite city of Gurgaon. One of the women told the NDTV network yesterday that they had been held at the apartment for about four months. “They raped us, kept us locked up, did not give us anything to eat... When we tried to run away, we were beaten up,” the woman said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia