Winnipeg, Canada
Beheading on bus: Canadians were in shock this week after a bus passenger was stabbed, decapitated, and partially eaten in front of horrified travelers. Witnesses said Vince Li, 40, suddenly attacked Tim McLean, 22, a stranger who was sleeping in the seat next to him, as the Greyhound bus traveled across the Manitoba prairie toward Winnipeg. The driver pulled over, and the other passengers rushed off the bus as Li cut off the head and held it up, then began cutting off body parts and consuming them. Li, who emmigrated from China four years ago and took a job as a newspaper carrier, was not previously known to have mental problems. “I had no odd suspicions about him at all,” said his boss, Vincent Augert.
Mexico City
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Fugitive drug lord captured: Mexican police have arrested a Colombian drug lord believed to be the main cocaine supplier to a Mexican drug gang. Ever Villafañe Martínez, who escaped from a Colombian prison in 2001, had been living under a false identity—complete with surgically altered fingerprints—in a posh Mexico City neighborhood. At the time of his escape, the U.S. had been seeking his extradition, alleging that he was responsible for shipping tons of cocaine to Mexico for export to the U.S. Since then, Mexican police say, Villafañe has been supplying a drug gang based in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Drug-gang warfare has killed more than 7,000 people in Mexico in the past three years.
Caracas, Venezuela
Neighborhood watch: President Hugo Chavez issued a slew of decrees this week that will make Venezuela more like Cuba, with government control of the economy and neighborhood-based militias. The orders came as a surprise on the last day of an 18-month period during which the legislature had granted Chavez the power to legislate by decree. Many of the orders included socialist concepts that voters specifically rejected last year in a referendum. For example, business owners who try to evade government price controls can be jailed, and the government can ration food and other goods. The most controversial of the decrees establishes local militias that resemble Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which encourage people to report “counterrevolutionary” activities by their neighbors.
Asuncion, Paraguay
U.S. ambassador is rock star: A CD by James Cason, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, has become a hit in the South American country. Cason, 63, recorded songs in Guarani, an indigenous language that few foreigners ever bother to learn. After one politician, Sen. Domingo Laino, complained that Cason had ruined the folk songs with his “horrible voice,” Paraguayans rose to the diplomat’s defense. The Senate voted down Laino’s motion of censure, and CD sales took off. Cason, who will retire from the State Department next month, is donating all proceeds from his record sales to a scholarship fund for Paraguayan youth.
