Berlin
Marathon cheater: The Mexican politician who won the over-55 age group in the Berlin marathon last month cheated, race officials said this week. An electronic tracking chip indicated that Roberto Madrazo, who finished the race in two hours and 41 minutes, took only 21 minutes to get from the 12.4-mile point to the 21.7-mile point, skipping two checkpoints in between. Nine miles in 21 minutes is faster than any human being can run. Madrazo, a member of the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, came in third in Mexico’s presidential race last year. At one point during his campaign, he said he’d been kidnapped and beaten by unknown assailants, a claim the police could not corroborate. Billboards across Mexico asked: “Do you believe Madrazo? I don’t either!”
London
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Postal workers strike: Millions of letters and packages were piling up in sorting centers and warehouses this week, as British postal workers held their second two-day strike in a week. Royal Mail employees have staged four other strikes since the summer, when they rejected a reform plan that would give them a 2.5 percent pay raise but cut as many as 40,000 jobs. Union official Roger Charles said strikes would continue until Royal Mail management stopped treating workers as “Dickensian-style wage slaves.” Royal Mail director Adam Crozier said he was simply trying to purge outdated practices, such as paying overtime to employees who finished their routes early and were asked to do other work for the remainder of their shifts.
Paris
Punching Monet: French police this week arrested four young men and a woman and charged them with vandalizing Claude Monet’s painting Le Pont d’Argenteuil. The five, who were apparently drunk, were caught on security camera breaking into the impressionist museum Musée d’Orsay late at night and leaving litter all over the place. They fled after one of them put a fist through the Monet, leaving a 4-inch hole. It was just the latest incident of art vandalism in France. In July, a woman defaced an all-white Cy Twombly painting in an Avignon museum by kissing it, leaving a lipstick mark. Last December, a man took a hammer to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal sculpture in the Pompidou, slightly cracking the work.
Warsaw
Life and death: The Council of Europe, a human-rights group, designated its first European Day Against the Death Penalty this week, over the objections of Poland, which wanted the day to officially condemn abortion as well. “If we are to discuss life issues, let us be honest and not hypocritical,” said Krzysztof Bosak, a Polish delegate to the Council of Europe. “It is not the death penalty but abortion and euthanasia that kills millions of innocent European citizens every year.” European officials said negotiations with Poland would continue, in the hopes that next year, Oct. 10 would be celebrated by the entire European Union. All E.U. countries ban the death penalty, while abortion is banned in just three European countries: Poland, Ireland, and Malta.
Bilbao, Spain
Basque separatists attack: A car bomb wounded one man this week in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao, in what authorities called an act of retaliation for the arrest last week of 23 leaders of an outlawed Basque group. The bomb exploded under the car of a bodyguard who works for a member of the Basque parliament. The Basque regional government and the Spanish government both blamed ETA, the militant Basque separatist group. Authorities said they had expected some ETA response after the Spanish judiciary last week arrested leaders of the Batasuna, ETA’s political wing, on charges that they were holding an illegal political meeting. Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba said authorities remained on high alert.
Ankara, Turkey
Taking the fight to Iraq: Turkey said this week it would send the military across the border into Iraq if necessary to hunt down Kurdish separatists. The announcement came just days after Kurdish rebels killed 13 Turkish soldiers in the southeast Turkish province of Sirnak. The military said the rebels were based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurdish residents in Iraq said the Turkish military had already begun shelling their villages. “If the Turkish troops decided to enter into Iraq’s Kurdistan territories, their decision would be wrong and they would sustain heavy casualties and material losses,” said Nozad Hadi, governor of an Iraqi Kurdish region. The U.S. concedes that Turkey’s Kurdish rebels have bases in Iraq, but it is strongly opposed to Turkish military intervention there.
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