World in brief: Embassy worker’s relatives killed
Gunmen carjacked a U.S. Embassy vehicle on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital Saturday and killed the wife of an embassy employee and his mother-in-law. Police later killed two of the carjackers.
Carjackings are common around Nairobi, and Kenya’s government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, said Saturday’s violence was believed to be “a random attack.”
“The thugs ordered the two women out, but they hesitated,” said Isaiah Osugo, a criminal investigator. “Then they were shot.”
Warsaw, Poland
Book recounts pope’s ski escapes
The late Pope John Paul II slipped away from his Swiss Guards to go skiing more than 100 times in the early years of his 26-year papacy, the pontiff’s longtime personal secretary says in a book released on Saturday.
It was hard at first for John Paul, an avid sportsman, to adjust to the confinement of the papacy, so he made informal “escapes” with his closest friends – three other Polish prelates, says Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz in his book, titled “Swiadectwo” or “The Testimony.”
John Paul made his first such outing two years into his papacy, on Jan. 2, 1981, setting out from the papal vacation residence at Castel Gandolfo in the car of the Rev. Jozef Kowalczyk. Kowalczyk, now papal nuncio to Poland, was driving; next to him was the Rev. Tadeusz Rakoczy, “with a newspaper spread out pretending he was reading in order to ‘hide’ the Holy Father who was sitting in the back seat,” Dziwisz wrote. After the trip, the beaming pope exclaimed, “We did it!”
In the book, released in Poland on Saturday, Dziwisz describes his 40 years as personal secretary to the pope, born Karol Wojtyla.
Jerusalem
Farsi Holocaust Web site launched
Israel’s Holocaust memorial has launched a version of its Web site in Farsi to educate the country’s most bitter enemy – Iran – about the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.
Iran has faced widespread condemnation for hosting a conference last month that questioned whether the Holocaust took place. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a myth.
The Web site was unveiled to coincide with Saturday’s U.N. annual Holocaust remembrance day, officials said. Saturday marked the 62nd anniversary of the Auschwitz death camp’s liberation by the advancing Soviet army.
Tijuana, Mexico
Police get their weapons back
Police in this violent border city got their guns back Saturday three weeks after they were forced to turn over weapons to federal authorities because of allegations they were colluding with drug traffickers.
Tijuana Public Safety Secretary Luis Javier Algorri said soldiers returned all 2,130 guns to his department.
He planned to send a letter to the attorney general’s office asking for the results of the investigation so he could clear up any doubts about his officers.