LONDON: Three men were remanded in custody by a British court yesterday in connection with a hammer attack at a London hotel on three wealthy tourists from the United Arab Emirates. The attack happened in the early hours of April 6 in a room on the seventh floor of the four-star Cumberland Hotel, next to Hyde Park and the main Oxford Street shopping area. Philip Spence, 32, of no fixed abode, appeared at Southwark Crown Court in London charged with three counts of attempted murder and one of aggravated burglary, Scotland Yard said. Also in court were Thomas Efremi, 56, of Islington, north London, who is charged with handling stolen goods and fraud by false representation, and James Moss, 33, of Finsbury Park, north London, who is also charged with handling stolen goods. All three were remanded in custody before a plea and management hearing at Southwark Crown Court on July 3. Carly Baker, 31, of Finsbury Park, who is charged with handling stolen goods, was bailed to appear at the same hearing. All four of those charged are British nationals. One of the victims remains in a critical condition in hospital. The other two women are also in hospital, but their injuries are not believed to be life-threatening, police said.
ROME: Pope Francis washed the feet of a dozen elderly and disabled people including a Libyan Muslim during an Easter ritual in Rome yesterday. The 77-year-old bent down with difficulty to wash and kiss the feet of the nine Italians and three foreigners aged between 16 and 86 years old at the Don Carlo Gnocchi foundation’s Santa Maria della Provvidenza centre. The youngest to have his feet washed at the ceremony was 16-year-old Osvaldinho from Cape Verde, who is wheelchair bound after damaging his spine diving into the sea last summer. Angelica, 86, who fell and broke her hip last year, was the oldest. Among the others was 75-year-old Hamed, a Libyan Muslim who worked for years for the Italian-Arab chamber of commerce, before a road accident left him with serious neurological damage.
MEXICO CITY: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, died yesterday. He was 87. A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece was One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Garcia Marquez died at his home in Mexico City. He had returned home from hospital last week after what doctors said was a bout of pneumonia. Known affectionately to friends and fans as “Gabo”, Garcia Marquez was Latin America’s best-known author and most beloved author and his books have sold in the tens of millions. Although One Hundred Years of Solitude was his most popular creation, other classics from Garcia Marquez included Autumn of the Patriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
CONAKRY: An Ebola outbreak blamed for 135 deaths in West Africa in the past month was not imported from Central Africa but caused by a new strain of the disease, a study in a US medical journal said, raising the spectre of further regional epidemics. The spread of Ebola from a remote corner of Guinea to the capital and into neighbouring Liberia, the first deadly outbreak reported in West Africa, has caused panic across a region struggling with weak healthcare systems and porous borders. Ebola is endemic to Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan and Gabon, and scientists initially believed that Central Africa’s Zaire strain of the virus was responsible for the outbreak. Using analysis of blood samples from infected patients, however, researchers determined that while the Guinean form of the Ebola virus showed a 97 percent similarity to the Zaire strain, the disease was not introduced from Central Africa. “This study demonstrates the emergence of a new EBOV strain in Guinea,” wrote the group of more than 30 doctors and scientists, who published their preliminary findings on the website of the New England Journal of Medicine. Agencies
