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.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
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