World in brief: Kenya lifts ban on live TV
Kenya said violence over disputed elections had eased enough to lift a monthlong ban on live television broadcasts, while the country’s political rivals sat down for new talks Monday.
The fighting has killed more than 1,000 people and made 300,000 homeless since the Dec. 27 presidential election, which foreign and local observers say was rigged. Protests have deteriorated into ethnic clashes, with much of the anger aimed at President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe, long resented for dominating politics and the economy.
“The live coverage ban was lifted because the security is better,” government spokesman Alfred Mutua told the Associated Press.
Oranjestad, Aruba
Holloway-related taping admissible
A hidden-camera interview with a Dutch student saying missing teenager Natalee Holloway was dead and that he had a friend dump her body at sea is admissible in court, the chief Aruban prosecutor said Monday.
The tape, which was first broadcast Sunday on Dutch television, has appeared to spur the investigation: Authorities in the Netherlands searched two homes Monday where the Dutch student – Joran Van der Sloot – has lived.
In the secret recordings, Van der Sloot said Holloway, 18, was drunk and that she began shaking and slumped down on the beach as they were kissing in May 2005.
“Suddenly she started shaking and then she didn’t say anything,” Van der Sloot said in Dutch, adding that he did not kill her. “I would never murder a girl.”
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Man says he took heart, church relic
A man arrested on suspicion of stealing a revered 19th- century bishop’s heart from an urn in a monastery confessed to taking the religious relic and tossing it in a trash can blocks away, a prosecutor said Monday.
Gemian Jasani, the only suspect detained in the case, was arrested a day after the Jan. 20 theft of the heart of Roman Catholic clergyman Mamerto Esquiu in the northwestern city of Catamarca. The friar’s heart has not been found.
Born in Catamarca in 1826, Esquiu entered the monastery at a young age and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1848. Esquiu died in 1883. When his body was exhumed for an autopsy shortly thereafter, church authorities said his heart showed no signs of decomposition. It was removed and given to the monastery where he began his religious studies.