UNITED STATES
Warhol smashes own record
The last of four in a series of Andy Warhol paintings depicting car crashes shattered the pop artist’s auction record on Wednesday, selling for more than US$105 million, Sotheby’s said. Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), signed and a part of his 1963 Death and Disasters series, fetched US$105,445,000 with three bidders vying for the buy in New York, the auction house said in a statement. The 2.43m tall and 4m wide work has two panels: to the left a series of 15 images of a car crash, and to the right, a large silvery rectangle. It is an imposing work experts describe as trailblazing and a cinematic allusion to death on a silver screen. The previous top sale for the enigmatic pop artist and son of Polish immigrants, who was born Andrej Varhola in Pittsburgh, was US$71.72 million, Sotheby’s said.
MALDIVES
EU warns of autocratic drift
The EU has warned that the country may drift back to autocratic rule, saying it will consider “appropriate measures” if the country cannot elect a resident in a rescheduled runoff vote on Saturday. In a declaration dated Wednesday, High Representative Catherine Ashton says any further delays or attempts to influence the outcome will be considered by the EU as actions made to prevent Maldivians from exercising their democratic rights. The statement comes after President Mohamed Waheed Hassan decided to extend his legal term by six days, purportedly to avoid a constitutional void after the country failed three times to elect a president.
UNITED STATES
Secret service agents fired
Two Secret Service agents have been removed from President Barack Obama’s security detail for alleged misconduct, The Washington Post reported late on Wednesday. The move came a year after the agency was involved in a prostitution scandal in Colombia. The Post said Ignacio Zamora Junior, who it said was in charge of about two dozen agents in the president’s security detail, was allegedly found last spring trying to re-enter a woman’s room at a luxury hotel near the White House after leaving behind a bullet from his service weapon. In a subsequent probe, the service found that Zamora and another supervisor, Timothy Barraclough, sent sexually suggestive e-mails to a female subordinate. The Post said the Secret Service has removed Zamora from his position and Barraclough was taken off the detail to a separate part of the division.
BRAZIL
Contest held for best rear end
Political correctness took a distant back seat late on Wednesday as the nation’s business hub of Sao Paulo played host to tabloid heaven with a contest honoring women’s rear ends. Namely, this year’s edition of Miss Bum Bum — in which 15 young women competed for the right to be crowned as the owner of the most delightful derriere. The winner, who got the vote of a half-male, half-female jury, was 25-year-old Dai Macedo from the central state of Goias for her 107cm of “bumbum.” Second was Eliana Amaral from Pernambuco in the north and, bringing up the rear, so to speak, was third-placed Jessica Amaral from the central northern region of Para. There was a report in daily O Dia of skulduggery amid suggestions an X-ray showing Amaral’s assets to be implant-free was a forgery. In recent days the Twitter sphere has been awash with catty remarks from some contestants denigrating each other — the dreaded word cellulite proving a favored insult — and the voting process.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
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