LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We are strangling the regime economically.”
White House deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough,
on Bashar Assad’s government in Syria Article 1A
Well-treated, freed Frenchman says
SAN ISIDRO, Colombia - A French journalist released to a humanitarian delegation by leftist rebels Wednesday said he was treated well during a month-long captivity that began when he was trapped in a firefight.
“They never tied me up,” Romeo Langlois said in a small southern hamlet before the hand-over ceremony.
“Rather, they always treated me as a guest. They gave me good food. ... They were always respectful.”
The 35-year-old journalist looked relaxed and smiled.
He did not appear bothered by the wound in his left arm that he suffered in the firefight.
Langlois arrived flanked by guerrillas in a green Toyota Land Cruiser and shook hands with farmers before fielding questions from reporters.
The Frenchman had been on assignment for France24 television and has covered Colombia for more than a decade. Langlois made no apologies for accompanying the military on the cocaine-lab eradication mission that led to his capture.
Porn actor sought in body-parts case
OTTAWA - A porn actor is wanted in a case of a dismembered body whose parts were mailed to different places, including the headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada, police said Wednesday.
Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, is wanted on homicide charges, Montreal police said at a news conference.
According to an official close to the investigation Magnotta worked as a porn actor and there is video of the crime. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the details.
Magnotta, believed to originally be from Toronto, was renting an apartment in a working-class Montreal neighborhood. It was behind that building that police found a man’s torso in a suitcase Tuesday, police said. That same day, a foot was found in a package mailed to the Conservative Party headquarters in Ottawa, and a hand was found at a postal warehouse in the Canadian capital. Early testing shows that the three body parts come from the same man, police said.
U.S. says American kidnapped in Benin
DAKAR, Senegal - An American citizen was kidnapped in the normally peaceful and politically stable nation of Benin, according to U.S. officials.
A statement published Tuesday on the website of the U.S. Embassy in the West African country did not identify the kidnapping victim nor say when the abduction occurred. It said only that the matter was being investigated and there was no reason to believe that other American nationals or interests were at risk in Benin.
A U.S. official familiar with the case said it appeared to be a straight kidnapping. There was a ransom demand and the victim was believed to be in good health. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The country, like its neighbors in this troubled, western corner of Africa, weathered repeated coups and military regimes after independence from France 52 years ago. But Benin turned a corner in the 1990s, holding free elections in a transition that was considered the first successful transfer of power in Africa from a dictatorship to a democracy.
Suu Kyi gives pep talk in Thailand
MAHACHAI, Thailand - Burma’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, on her first foreign trip in nearly a quarter-century, offered encouragement Wednesday to impoverished aliens whose flight from their homeland is emblematic of the devastation wrought there by decades of misrule.
“Don’t feel down, or weak. History is always changing,” she told an exuberant crowd of thousands southwest of Bangkok. Many held signs saying, “We want to go home,” and Suu Kyi said her visit was aimed at learning how she could help them.
In the town of Mahachai, home to Thailand’s largest population of Burmese refugees, thousands of Burma’s downtrodden crowded around her and chanted: “Long Live Mother Suu!”
After speaking to the crowd, Suu Kyi met with alien workers who told her they are mistreated by employers but don’t know their rights and have no legal means to settle disputes.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 05/31/2012