World Briefs

Disgraced fashion designer John Galliano yesterday told a Paris court he was not anti-Semitic and that the racial abuse he subjected cafe customers to was done in a haze of alcohol and drugs.

“All my life I have fought against prejudice, intolerance and discrimination, having been subjected to it myself,” he said after a judge invited him to comment on a video in which he delivers anti-Jewish insults.

“These are not the sentiments of John Galliano,” he said. “I do not have these views and I have never held them.”

He earlier told the court that he suffered from a triple addiction to alcohol, valium and sleeping pills. (AFP)

Former militant

Brazil issued a residence permit yesterday to freed Italian ex-militant Cesare Battisti, the labour ministry announced, two weeks after the Supreme Court rejected Italy’s request to extradite the convicted murderer.

The decision had been widely expected given the June 10 release of Mr Battisti, who had been imprisoned for four years near Brasilia pending a resolution of the extradition battle.

Mr Battisti, now 56, was convicted by an Italian court in 1993 for the murders of four people in the 1970s. (AFP)

Russian position

Russia’s embassy in Sofia has slammed as “outrageous” the brief transformation by unknown artists of a Soviet army monument into a tableau of superheroes and other pop culture figures.

“The Russian embassy is again compelled to highlight an outrageous act of vandalism against the Soviet army monument in Sofia,” the embassy said.

The artists on Saturday painted as comic strip heroes the nine figures of a bronze relief sculpture that is part of the massive downtown monument honouring the Red Army’s advance on Nazi-allied Bulgaria during World War II.

The flamboyant coat of paint on the monument had been cleaned up by early Tuesday. (AFP)

Welcome bequest

A US private investigator said he has tracked down a homeless man and delivered some good news: he has inherited a lot of money.

David Lundberg said he found Max Melitzer pushing a shopping trolley filled with personal possessions in a Salt Lake City park yesterday afternoon. Mr Lundberg declined to disclose how much money Mr Melitzer will be receiving, but said the man’s brother, who died of cancer last year, left him a “significant” amount in his will.

He said Mr Melitzer was “in shock” after learning of the inheritance. Mr Lundberg said he was hired by the family’s New York law firm to locate Mr Melitzer. (PA)

Poster drive

Authorities in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv yesterday pinned up posters on billboards equating Nazism to Communism to mark the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

The posters, with the slogan “Communism = Nazism”, were a provocative gesture in a country whose east still fondly remembers the rule of the USSR, which the more nationalist west regards as an occupation.

The billboards show two pictures, one of locals murdered murdered by the Soviets in 1941 and another of seven people hung in public by the Nazis in 1942 after the invasion. When the Nazis entered western Ukraine in 1941, some greeted them as liberators from the Soviets.

Nationalist guerrillas continued to fight Soviet forces in the mountains of western Ukraine into the 1950s . (AFP)

New tribe

An indigenous tribe with some 200 members who have had no contact with the outside world has been located in Brazil’s Amazon near the Peruvian border, the National Indian Foundation (Funai) said yesterday. Satellite and air surveillance images confirmed the existence of the tribe in the Javari valley.

Brazilian authorities prohibit the general population from contact with the isolated tribes because of fears that natives could become infected with diseases for which they carry no immunity.The flights showed huts and plantings of corn and bananas in the community.

The region is threatened by illegal logging, fishing and gold mining operations and by drug traffickers operating in the area, according to officials. (AFP)

Hit by poodle

A Brazilian husband hit his wife in the head with a pet poodle.

The man picked up the dog and swung it into his wife’s head twice because he suspected she was having an affair. The 4lb dog died – but the wife, suffered only minor bruises. (AP)