UNITED KINGDOM
Ad riles North Koreans
Staff at a London hair salon say they had a close shave with North Korean officials after using the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to promote a discount. M&M Hair Academy says it was visited by two men from the nearby North Korean embassy after putting up a poster last week featuring a picture of Kim and the slogan “Bad Hair Day?” Barber Karim Nabbach said the manager refused to remove the poster and reported the incident to police. Metropolitan Police said on Tuesday that officers had spoken to both sides of the dispute and concluded “there were no offenses for us to investigate.”
UNITED STATES
Court to hear campaign case
Negative campaigning and mudslinging may be a fact of life in politics, but can false accusations made in the heat of an election be punished as a crime? That debate makes its way to the Supreme Court next week as the justices consider a challenge to an Ohio law that bars false statements about political candidates during a campaign. Groups across the political spectrum have criticized the law as a restriction on the First Amendment right to free speech. The court is not expected to rule directly on the constitutional issue, but will focus on whether the law can be challenged before it is actually enforced.
URUGUAY
‘Poorest’ leader lists worth
President Jose Mujica has declared US$322,883 in wealth. Mujica’s insistence on living simply has earned him the nickname “the poorest president in the world,” but his sworn declaration this year shows a 74 percent increase in wealth since 2012. He said that is because he did not put his money, about US$104,000, into bank accounts until recently. He still lives on a ramshackle flower farm with his wife, Senator Lucia Topolansky, and he reported the farm’s value at about US$108,000. The couple share ownership in two other properties. He also reported that he has three tractors and two 1987 VW Beetles. Meanwhile, Vice President Daniel Astori says he is worth US$389,000.
UNITED KINGDOM
Musicians lose appeal
Musicians who performed in the London production of War Horse have lost a legal bid to stop the National Theatre from replacing them with a recorded soundtrack. The five performers, laid off last month, asked the High Court for an injunction so they could keep their jobs pending a legal challenge. Judge Ross Cranston refused on Tuesday, saying reinstating the musicians would cause “not insignificant practical difficulty” for the company. However, he said the five had a strong case to argue for breach of contract. War Horse is one of the theater’s most successful shows, with productions running elsewhere in the county and in the US and Germany.
AUSTRALia
Pemier quits over wine
New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell quit yesterday amid mounting evidence that he failed to declare a A$3,000 (US$2,800) bottle of wine that arrived as a gift on his Sydney doorstep. O’Farrell told a corruption inquiry on Tuesday that he never received a bottle of 1959 Penfolds Grange Hermitage as a gift from businessman Nick Di Girolamo congratulating him weeks after his 2011 election win. Grange is an iconic label and is synonymous with expensive wine. Grange vintages are consistently rated among the nation’s best shiraz. O’Farrell, who described himself as “no wine aficionado,” was supposed to add such a valuable gift to a public register aimed at deterring political donors from buying influence.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
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