■IRAN
Ahmadinejad aide quits
A top adviser and aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has resigned, less than two months ahead of the presidential election, the state news agency IRNA reported yesterday. Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi submitted his resignation, which is yet to be accepted by Ahmadinejad, on Tuesday, IRNA said. “Allow me to submit my resignation in order to have an opportunity to serve in other areas,” Samareh Hashemi said in his letter carried by IRNA. He has been a top adviser to Ahmadinejad since he swept to power in 2005.
■UNITED STATES
Officer guilty of trafficking
A border patrol agent who tried to import rare tortoises in a box labeled “scorpions” pleaded guilty on Tuesday to animal-trafficking charges, the Justice Department said. It turns out that scorpions also draw an extra look from federal agents. Rene Soliz faces a maximum one-year sentence and will resign from the border patrol after entering his guilty plea in Texas on charges that he illegally attempted to receive 15 Tanzanian leopard tortoises, the department said. Under an international treaty on trade in endangered species, the tortoises are considered potentially threatened and cannot be traded without an export permit. But they are often sold as pets and carry a market value of about US$50 each, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames said.
■UKRAINE
Police seize cigarettes
Law enforcers at the Chop border crossing inspecting vehicles traveling to the Czech Republic late on Tuesday night discovered more than 220,000 packages of L&M cigarettes concealed in a rail car, Korrespondent magazine reported yesterday. The freight car built to haul flammable or toxic liquid gas contained four hidden compartments between the gas tanks’ steel exterior and glass interior walls, in which smugglers had stored the cigarettes, a police official said. The record load of illicit shipment had a street value of approximately US$1.5 million in the EU. “We believe we have destroyed the operations of a major cigarette smuggling ring,” a customs service statement said.
■TURKEY
Fighter pilot dies in crash
Balikesir Governor Selahattin Hatipoglu said that a military fighter pilot died in a crash in western Turkey. Hatipoglu said the F-16 pilot did not survive Tuesday’s crash during a training flight. The jet had taken off from a base in the province. The governor said the plane went down near the town of Mustafakemalpasa in neighboring province of Bursa. The cause of the crash is under investigation. Balikesir is a hub for Turkish jets, which often engage with Greek warplanes in the disputed air space of Aegean Sea.
■KENYA
Man bites python
A man bit a python who wrapped him in its coils and hauled him up a tree in a struggle that lasted hours, the Daily Nation newspaper reported yesterday. Ben Nyaumbe, a farm manager in Malindi, was working at the weekend when the serpent struck. When the snake coiled itself round his upper body, Nyaumbe resorted to desperate measures: “I had to bite it.” The python dragged him up a tree, but when it eased its grip, Nyaumbe said he was able to take his cellphone from his pocket and call for help. When his supervisor came with a policeman, Nyaumbe smothered the snake’s head with his shirt, while the rescuers tied it with a rope and pulled. The snake later escaped from the three sacks it was bundled into.
■CANADA
PPS to appeal sentence
The Public Prosecution Service (PPS) said on Tuesday it was appealing the 10-and-a-half year prison sentence handed out last month to Momin Khawaja, the first Canadian found guilty under Ottawa’s post-Sept. 11, 2001, anti-terror law. Khawaja, a 29-year-old Canadian of Pakistani origin, was sentenced on March 12 to prison for participating in a foiled plot to attack several sites in Britain. Prosecutors had sought a maximum life sentence of 44 years to 58 years in prison for Khawaja, similar in length to those handed to five of his co-conspirators in Britain. The plot included attacks on a nightclub, a shopping center and electrical and gas facilities. Khawaja was accused of developing bomb detonators for his British associates, possessing explosives, financing terrorism and training as a terrorist in Pakistan.
■BRAZIL
Inmates escape with babies
Six female inmates escaped with their babies from a prison unit where they were allowed to stay with their newborn children, authorities said. The women used makeshift knives to overpower guards and escape the facility outside Sao Paulo. Two guard dogs were found drugged. Police officer Luiz Ferretti said on Tuesday all six women were recaptured. The facility’s director, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with prison policy, said the babies were doing fine. The women escaped on Monday. Inmates at the hospital-like unit are allowed to breast-feed their infants until they reach six months. Authorities said three other women escaped without their babies. One remains at large.
■BRAZIL
Cash-stuffed bra is lifesaver
Police say a wad of cash stuffed in a woman’s bra saved her life during a shootout. Salvador city police spokesman Vicente de Paula said 58-year-old Ivonete Pereira de Oliveira was a passenger on a bus that two gunmen held up on Saturday. He said an armed off-duty policeman on the bus opened fire. In the ensuing gun battle, a bullet struck the left side of Oliveira’s chest. De Paula said on Tuesday that the 150 reals (US$70) worth of bills that Oliveira hid inside her bra slowed the bullet enough to prevent it from entering her heart and killing her instantly. Oliveira underwent surgery to remove the bullet from her left breast and was released from hospital on Monday.
■PERU
Bus passengers burned alive
At least 20 bus passengers were burned alive on Tuesday after their vehicle collided with a gas tanker truck on a highway 165km south of Lima, police said. Cesar Fornet, an official with the government’s highway police force, said the passengers died when the bus collided with the truck, exploding in a raging inferno. Officials said only “a very few” of the roughly 30 passengers on the bus were able to escape with their lives. “Nothing is left. The vehicle was like a crematorium,” police colonel Wilfredo Gonzales said.
■UNITED STATES
Ewe surprises farmer
A farmer whose ewe gave birth to twins found himself carefully counting sheep when he later discovered three more lambs. The Lansing State Journal reported on Tuesday that one of Paul Oesterle’s Suffolk-mix ewes gave birth to quintuplets last week. Michigan State University sheep expert Alan Culham says the chance of that breed bearing the multiple litter is one in 10,000. Oesterle says he thought the ewe had given birth to twins, but he found three more lambs when he checked the next day.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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