Fri, Feb 13, 2015 page7

• World News Quick Take

  • Agencies
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  UNITED STATES

  Reporter dies in crash

  Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon was killed in a car crash on Wednesday. He was 73. A car in which Simon was a passenger hit another car in Manhattan, police said. Simon and the car’s driver were taken to a hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead. Simon was among a handful of elite journalists to cover most major overseas conflicts and news stories since the late 1960s, CBS television network said. He won numerous awards, including his fourth Peabody and an Emmy for his 2012 story from the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the world’s only symphony comprised solely of black musicians. Another story about an orchestra in Paraguay won him his 27th Emmy, CBS said.

  FRANCE

  Survey rates reckless drivers

  Italy has produced Europe’s most reckless drivers, a survey released yesterday found, while Greeks were judged the rudest on the continent by Europeans. Thirty-eight percent of 10,000 Europeans questioned in the survey released by motorway operator Vinci described Italians as driving dangerously, a figure that rose to 58 percent among Italian respondents. Greeks came in second with 20 percent of those surveyed declaring them the most irresponsible motorists. And while 56 percent of the Europeans surveyed admitted to road rage incidents such as insulting other motorists, 74 percent of Greeks admitted to such behavior. At the other end of the scale, Swedes were judged the most responsible drivers, cited as such by 37 percent of respondents, followed by Germans with 27 percent and British and Dutch drivers, who were tied with 11 percent of positive responses each. Those surveyed by market research firm IPSOS on behalf of Vinci were drawn from 10 countries and asked about driving habits.

  UNITED STATES

  Priest admits bizarre plot

  In a case that reads like a movie script, a Catholic priest on Wednesday pleaded guilty to trying to help a convicted mob assassin recover a purported Stradivarius violin hidden in the wall of a house. Eugene Klein, who had been a US federal prison chaplain, admitted to conspiring in 2011 to defraud the federal government by passing messages from mobster Frank Calabrese to an unnamed associate on how to get the violin out of Calabrese’s Wisconsin home. If found and authenticated as made by 18th-century instrument maker Antonio Stradivari, such a violin would have been worth millions of dollars. Calabrese, also known as “Frankie Breeze,” was serving a life sentence at the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, in connection with more than a dozen gangland slayings. Klein, of Springfield, Missouri, faces up to five years in prison and a US$250,000 fine when he is sentenced on June 23.

  ANTARCTICA

  Icebound boat spurs mission

  Crews from the US and New Zealand yesterday were trying to rescue a damaged fishing boat with 27 people aboard that remains stuck in ice near Antarctica. The US Coast Guard said the Australian boat Antarctic Chieftain suffered damage to three of its four propellers after getting stuck on Wednesday and can no longer maneuver. US Coast Guard spokesman Lieutenant Donnie Brzuska said it has sent the icebreaker Polar Star on a 330 nautical mile (611km) mission to free the fishing boat. He said the cutter will need to break through several kilometers of ice that is 2.7m thick, as well as endure high winds and snowfall.
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