World Briefs

Leonardo DiCaprio has dethroned Johnny Depp as the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.

The Titanic star earned £47m last year, pushing his Pirates Of The Caribbean rival into second place with £31 million. According to Forbes, Mr DiCaprio jumped from fifth to first on the back of Shutter Island and Inception, after the films earned a combined total of £736 million.

In his next film, the 36-year-old will play FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the title role in The Great Gatsby. (PA)

Grandad chained

A woman and her husband have been detained in southern Russia after they kept the woman’s father, 70, on a chain in their yard for four days, investigators said yesterday.

The couple “tied him to a tree with a metal chain in their yard and kept him there from July 28 to August 1”, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

It published photographs of a thin, grey-haired man sitting on a mattress with a chain attached to his foot and of the couple’s one-storey detached house in a rubbish-strewn yard in the southern Rostov region.

“Neighbours heard his cries for help and called law enforcers,” investigators said.

Investigators confiscated as evidence the 3.5 metre chain, as well as his aluminium drinking cup and a plastic water bottle, and launched a probe into illegal imprisonment.

“This outrageous case causes deep horror,” investigators said.

The man’s daughter, 41, “had grown tired of taking care of the blind and deaf man and simply took him out into the yard and chained him up”, the Life News website reported, adding that the couple’s children were witnesses.

Contract killing

A Moscow woman hired a hitman to kill her 21-year-old son because he refused to pay back a loan for a new computer, investigators said yesterday.

The woman, 47, and her son quarrelled after he took out a loan in her name to buy a notebook computer and neglected to pay her back, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

She approached an acquain­t-ance and offered him more than $17,160 to kill her son. But he secretly reported the request to police and the woman was arrested as she handed over the final payment.

The woman had taken out another bank loan to pay the hitman, investigators added.

Vulgar souvenirs

With the aid of stiff fines, the Italian city of Pisa has launched a campaign against trashy tourist souvenirs deemed harmful to the image of its monuments, notably its Leaning Tower.

Topping the list of offensive memorabilia are boxer shorts with a strategically-placed replica of the Tuscan city’s famous tower, which on Monday landed five salesmen a fine of $720 each, municipal spokesman Francesco Paletti said yesterday.

The offence? Selling “merch­andise harmful to propriety”.

Other targeted souvenirs include an apron sporting the image of Michelangelo’s famous David nude sculpture, and underwear decorated with suggestive pictures from the ancient city of Pompeii.

“These horrors must be eliminated from the shelves of souvenir merchants,” Pisa mayor Marco Filippeschi was quoted as saying in the media, while the local Church judged the items “vulgar and offensive to the faithful”.

Far-fetched

A 10-year-old German girl who gave herself a radical haircut and then feared her parents’ reaction claimed she was kidnapped by a man armed with a pair of scissors, authorities said yesterday.

Police spokesman Thorsten Schiewe in the northern city of Hanover said the girl ran to a neighbour on Tuesday with the story that someone had broken into her house, threatened her with scissors and held her captive for a short time.

The neighbour alerted the police, Mr Schiewe said.

“Officers went to the scene, took down statements and launched a manhunt for a supposed perpetrator on the run,” he said. “We dispatched a few police cars.”

The girl admitted hours later that she and her brother had found the scissors in the basement and given themselves a major trim. (AFP)