World Briefs

A pensioner who helped defend a department store during the London riots has been awarded a golden broom for her bravery.

Brenda, who has asked not to be named in full for fear of reprisals, was saluted with brooms and cheered by members of staff at the Debenhams in Clapham Junction.

Staff and members of the community, including Brenda, worked hard to reopen it just three days later. (PA)

Persistent caller

Dutch prosecutors are charging a 42-year-old woman with stalking after she allegedly called her former boyfriend 65,000 times in the past year.

The 62-year-old victim from The Hague filed a police complaint in August due to the persistent phone calls. Police arrested the suspected stalker on Monday, seizing several mobile phones and computers from her home in Rotterdam.

Hague prosecutionspokesman Nicolette Stoel said the woman argued to judges at a preliminary hearing she had a relationship with the man and the number of calls she placed to him was not excessive. The man denied they had a relationship.

The court ordered her not to contact him again. (PA)

Composer dies

Composer, arranger, band­leader, producer and teacher Wardell Quezergue, who arranged Chapel of Love for the Dixie Cups and was dubbed the Creole Beethoven by Allen Toussaint, has died. He was 81.

He died of congestive heart failure, said his son Brian.

“What a mark he made. In fact what several marks he made,” Mr Toussaint said.

“He was just a magnificent man in every way. He was a superb musician and bandleader. He always inspired the best out of people who were playing with him.”

Hits arranged by Quezergue include Iko Iko for the Dixie Cups, Big Chief for Professor Longhair, Mr Big Stuff for Jean Knight and Groove Me for King Floyd - the last two recorded the same day in 1961 at Quezergue’s Malaco Records in Jackson, Mississippi. (PA)

Suffocates newborns

A 32-year-old German woman has admitted to suffocating three of her newborn babies because they cried too much and she felt unable to cope, police said yesterday

The Russian-born woman confessed to killing one girl and two boys in September 2004, June 2006 and March 2009, said police and prosecutors in the town of Limburg, near Frankfurt in western Germany.

Autopsies on the first two infants, who died only a few weeks after birth, revealed nothing suspicious and authorities assumed they were victims of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

However, a probe was launched when the third baby died, as authorities said the probability of three cases of SIDS in the same family was exceptionally remote. (AFP)

Japan quake

An earthquake rattled Japan’s tsunami-ravaged northeast coast yesterday, US geologists said, but there were no immediate reports of further damage and no tsunami alert. The tremor struck under the Pacific Ocean. (AFP)

9/11 released tapes

Recordings of the full exchanges between ground control, pilots and military authorities during the terrifying chaos of the 9/11 hijackings were made public for the first time yesterday.

While portions of the audio recordings have circulated before, the document published by the Rutgers Law Review allows an unprecedented blow-by-blow recreation of the brief period on September 11, 2001, when four airliners were hijacked and slammed into New York, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. (AFP)

No moon launch

High wind has forced the postponement of the launch of Nasa’s newest moon spacecraft. An unmanned rocket was supposed to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, yesterday with the twin probes, but the countdown was halted because of gusty wind in the flight path.

Nasa said it will try again tomorrow, despite another poor weather forecast. The space agency has just two single-second launch windows each day.

The Grail mission is the first in more than 50 years of lunar exploration that is dedicated to measuring the moon’s gravity. (PA)