FRANCE
Woman offers breastfeeding
A woman has posted an offer on a Web site to breastfeed babies of gay couples for 100 euros (US$130) a day. The post, which the Web site said it verified as genuine and legal, reads: “I am a young mother in perfect health, a trained nurse of 29, and I am renting my breasts to milk-feed infants.” The offer promises up to 10 breast-feeds a day. Alexandre Woog, chief executive of the e-loue Web site where the offer appeared, said its staff had contacted the woman and had no doubt about her identity and the seriousness of the proposal, nor the legality of the service proposed. “Our legal advisers are sure of this. It’s illegal in France to sell maternal milk, but this is a person proposing a service, not selling the milk in flasks,” Woog said. He said his Web site, created in 2009 as a platform where users can offer or hire anything legal online, checks any posts that raise eyebrows. The poster told Reuters that she had “received more than a dozen requests, but only half of them were serious. The rest were from perverts.” The breastfeeding offer was the second major eyecatcher since the Web site was founded, Woog said. Another user previously offered to rent out two goats as lawn-cutters.
UNITED STATES
Daredevil skydives in coffin
A daredevil freed himself from shackles and a locked casket while plummeting to the Earth at 20kph on Tuesday, eventually parachuting gently into a northern Illinois field. Anthony Martin, 47, waved to the cameras and the crowd that turned out to watch his stunt after he landed at a farm in Serena, about 112km southwest of Chicago. Martin said the escape was exhilarating, but that he was disoriented because the plywood casket whipped wildly from side to side while he picked the locks, and he struggled to open the door. “I didn’t feel any force, but what I felt was lot a of jostling,” he said. “It seemed to me like I had a glimpse of the ground for a second then it [the door] came back and I had to give it another push.” Martin, who began teaching himself to pick locks at age six, somersaulted out of the box as he pushed his way out. Everyone involved in the stunt landed safely and no one was seriously hurt, although one of the skydivers trying to steady the box slammed into the door of the plane as they exited, giving him a fat lip and a scraped arm.
BRAZIL
Teen kills family, then self
A teenager killed his police officer parents, his grandmother and his great-aunt, and then, after a full day at school, took his own life, police said on Tuesday. The five bodies were found before dawn on Tuesday inside two houses located on the same property in northern Sao Paulo, they said. “Everything seems to indicate that [13-year-old] Marcelo [Pesseghini] killed his parents and relatives,” Itagiba Franco, of the Sao Paulo Civilian Police’s homicide department, told a press conference. Police said the teen’s parents were killed late on Sunday or in the early hours of Monday. Franco said Pesseghini had told a friend he wanted to kill his parents and become a hitman. “He always told me he wanted to become a hired killer. He had a plan to kill his parents during the night, so that no one would notice, and escape in the parents’ car and live in an abandoned place,” police quoted the unidentified friend as saying. The teenager died from a shot to the left temple, while his father’s police-issue service revolver was found nearby, Sao Paulo police commander Benedito Roberto Meira said.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS