RUSSIA
DiCaprio a ‘real man’: Putin
Not everyone gets to be called a “real man” by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself, but the tough guy awarded that honor late on Tuesday on Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, whose plane caught fire on the way to a summit on tigers in St Petersburg. “I would like to thank you for coming despite all the obstacles,” Putin told a smiling DiCaprio, who pledged US$1 million to the tiger cause. “A person with less stable nerves could have decided against coming, could have read it as a sign that it was not worth going,” Putin said. He said the Titanic star had “literally tore his way through to Saint Petersburg,” calling him “a real man” for his persistence. DiCaprio was among the passengers on a Delta Airline jet that made an emergency landing in New York on Monday after losing an engine. His second plane faced strong headwinds and had to make an unscheduled refueling stop in Helsinki, Putin told the audience.
FRANCE
Binge drinking affects heart
Binge drinking, long known as a cause of liver damage, is also linked to heart disease, according to a 10-year study in Northern Ireland and France published yesterday by the British Medical Journal. Researchers from Britain and France contrasted the drinking patterns among more than 9,700 middle-aged men in Lille, Strasbourg, Toulouse and Belfast. The volunteers, aged 50-59, were free from heart disease at the start of the study in 1991. Over the course of a week, the volume of alcohol they consumed was roughly the same. In France, though, the drinking was spread out quite evenly over a week and mainly involved wine. In Belfast, the men usually consumed beer, followed by spirits, and heavily concentrated their drinking at weekends. Men who were “binge” drinkers were nearly twice as likely as regular drinkers, during the 10-year course of the study, to have a heart attack or die from heart disease.
ISRAEL
Facebook foils draft dodgers
About a 1,000 women who tried to avoid military service by pretending to be religious have been caught out through their Facebook accounts, an army spokesman said on Tuesday. The military has managed to track down hundreds of women who lied about being religiously observant, Captain Arye Shalicar said. One woman was caught out after she posted a photograph in which she is seen eating in a non-kosher restaurant, while others were caught wearing revealing clothing, he said. Others were caught out by accepting invitations to parties on a Friday night — which were sent out as bait by firms of private investigators paid to sniff out the fakers. “If you see someone updating their account on Shabbat, it tells you she is using a computer, and probably talking on the phone and watching TV, which is forbidden,” he said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Mystery blast unexplained
An explosion that rocked a remote corner of Scottish woodland remained unexplained on Tuesday, even as police wrapped up their search of the site. Police in the Strathclyde area have said they’re ending their examination of Garadbhan Forest following what they described as a systematic search of the area. Police offered no detail on the nature or circumstances of the blast, which hit the forest at noon on Nov. 17. A statement referred to “items” discovered at the scene, but did not say if these were thought to be explosives or other clues. A police spokeswoman last week said details were being kept secret for unspecified “operational reasons.”
ZIMBABWE
Prisoner shows real guts
A man awaiting trial for stealing motor cycles was locked up in remand prison for months with his intestines hanging out after being shot in a police raid. The accused appeared in court for a bail application this week holding his protruding intestines in a plastic bag, local media reported yesterday. A shocked judge ordered prison authorities to immediately take the man to hospital. The man told the court he had not had medical help since his arrest in September. A prison spokesman said the man had been taken back to hospital at least twice, but there was no doctor on those occasions, and he was receiving painkillers.
MEXICO
Ultra-pricey tequila debuts
A distiller has presented what it hopes will become the world’s most expensive tequila, a platinum and diamond-studded bottle of seven-year-old liquor. Hacienda La Capilla’s 1.3 liter bottle is made of ceramic, with a 2.3kg layer of platinum and more than 4,000 diamonds totaling 328 carats. Hacienda La Capilla already holds the Guinness record for the most expensive tequila with a bottle that sold for US$225,000 in 1996. An official with the company said they hoped the new creation would fetch US$3.5 million.
CANADA
Quaid says Canada saved life
Randy Quaid said on Tuesday if it weren’t for Canada’s refugee system, he and his wife would be dead. The actor made the comment on Tuesday as he entered his immigration and refugee board hearing in Vancouver, where he and his wife, Evi, were picked up last month on an outstanding warrant in the US. The pair claimed refugee status and their hearings have been conducted amid their bizarre claims of being hunted by what they call “Hollywood star whackers.” They say many of their friends have died under mysterious circumstances and believe they could be next on the hit list. Quaid is hoping to convince Canada’s Immigration and Refugee board that he and his wife are targeted by Hollywood killers and thereby accomplish what no other American has ever done in Canada: Gain refugee status. “I feel good. If it wasn’t for Canada’s refugee laws my wife and I would be dead,” Quaid said before he entered court. Quaid and his wife remain fugitives from a California court after the couple failed to appear last week for their arraignment on felony vandalism charges for the fourth time.
HUNGARY
Dictator asked for priest
The nation’s communist dictator Janos Kadar met a priest at his own request shortly before he died, former Hungarian prime minister Miklos Nemeth revealed on Tuesday. “Aunt Mariska [Kadar’s wife] called me: ‘My husband wants a priest,’ she said,” said Nemeth, who headed the country’s last Communist-era government from 1988 to 1990. “I still remember the Catholic priest whom I found, he was a short man called Biro, I think,” he said. “I don’t know whether Kadar atoned to him or what he told him, you can’t ask a priest about such things. There is no way to find out now — everybody has died since.” Nemeth said this happened in late May or early June, 1989. Kadar died on July 6, 1989, the day that Hungary’s Supreme Court rehabilitated Imre Nagy, Hungary’s prime minister under the 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union, who was hanged in 1958 after Kadar restored the country’s communist regime. Former Soviet bloc regimes were hostile to religion. “This [Kadar’s request] struck all of us as a complete surprise,” Nemeth said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency