World Briefs
Hitler schnapps for sale
Prosecutors in Austria said yesterday they were investigating whether a man was breaking the law by selling wine and schnapps with a picture of Adolf Hitler and swastikas on the labels.
“From me you can get nostalgic bottles with the greats of history,” the purveyor of the products, Roland Marte from the Voralberg region of western Austria, proclaims on the internet.
The head of the Feldkirch public prosecutors’ office, Wilfried Siegele, said the case “requires a closer look” in order to determine whether the bottles broke laws forbidding the glorification of the Nazis.
Thieves steal rhino horn
Thieves used stun gas to overpower guards before stealing a white rhinoceros horn from a museum in the heart of Paris yesterday, in the latest of a string of heists targeting the rare ivory, the museum said.
Two people, backed by an accomplice, burst into the museum of hunting and nature in Paris historic Marais district at around 2 p.m., neutralised the guards and made off with the horn of a rhino captured in South Africa in the 1980s.
The security guards were briefly treated for the effects of the stun gas.
Illegal ring of... waste plastic
Italian police said yesterday they have arrested 54 people accused of illegally exporting waste plastic to Southeast Asia in a lucrative business of potentially environmentally harmful products.
Police seized 114 containers with 2,600 tonnes of waste including car tyres at the port of Taranto in southern Italy and said they had managed to trace transfers of six million euros between Italy and Asia.
The police said in a statement that the people arrested “belonged to a dangerous trans-national criminal organisation devoted to the illicit trans-border traffic of large quantities of special waste products”.
Charged over murder plot
Three men were charged in Sweden yesterday plotting the murder of a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a dog, a prosecutor said.
“The three people now charged in Gothenburg district court are suspected of preparing to commit murder in September 2011 in Gothenburg. The planned victim for the attack was the artist Lars Vilks (pictured above),” prosecutor Agnetha Hilding Qvarnstroem said in a statement.
Mr Vilks has faced numerous death threats and another suspected assassination plot since his cartoon was first published by a Swedish regional newspaper in 2007, illustrating an editorial on the importance of freedom of expression.