World Vignettes

Copernicus' treatise stolenKIEV: Thieves walked out of the Ukrainian national library in Kiev with a rare copy of a treatise by the 16th ...

Copernicus8217; treatise stolen

KIEV: Thieves walked out of the Ukrainian national library in Kiev with a rare copy of a treatise by the 16th century astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, valued at several hundred million dollars. There are only 80 copies worldwide of the 1543 treatise, which outlined Copernicus8217;s earth-shattering concept that the planets revolve around the sun and not the Earth as previously thought, according to the head of the Vernadsky library Alexy Onishchenko. A young man speaking Russian with a foreign accent was the last person to consult the 404-page book before it disappeared Wednesday, he said. Police have not arrested any suspect.

Di8217;s garden

LONDON: Prince Charles supports the plans for a controversial memorial garden outside Kensington Palace, the former London home of Diana, Princess of Wales, it was reported on Saturday. The Daily Mail said that Charles had written to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, head of the government-sponsored PrincessDiana Memorial Committee, to explain the kind of garden his ex-wife would have liked most. 8220;The prince wants to make sure it is done properly,quot; an aide to the Prince of Wales was quoted as saying. A proposal to remodel one tenth of Hyde Park and make a modest 27-acre 11. 25-Hectare garden of remembrance has been accepted by Diana8217;s memorial committee as one of five proposals for commemorating her life and work. But the project has been challenged by the rich and famous residents of Kensington and Chelsea. They saw the gardens become an impromptu floral shrine in the days immediately after her death in a Paris car crash last August and fear a memorial garden will mean a permanent tourist invasion of the site, making their lives intolerable.

Tenor dead

BERLIN: US tenor James O8217;Neal has died of cancer aged 49, his German agent Marianne Boettger said late Friday. O8217;Neal was best known for his roles in Wagner operas in Europe and the United States. In Berlin O8217;Neal performed as Stolzing in DieMeistersinger and as Siegmund in Die Walkyrie, and in Dresden in Parsifal. He was last seen on stage in Tannhaeuser in Bielefeld in March. But O8217;Neal also sang more contemporary works such as Koenig Kandaules by Alexander von Zemlinsky in Hamburg, and Igor Stravinsky8217;s Oedipus Rex in Paris.

Saddam8217;s fighters

BAGHDAD: Six members of quot;Saddam8217;s fightersquot;, a paramilitary group run by Iraqi president8217;s son Uday, each had a hand chopped off for accepting bribes, Babel newspaper reported today. Uday ordered the amputation after a commission of inquiry found the six volunteers guilty of setting up a fake checkpoint in the southern province of Basrah and taking bribes from local residents. The newspaper said several members of Saddam8217;s fighters, formed in 1994 to protect the president, wrote to Uday calling on him to lighten the sentence. But Uday said in a letter published by the paper, which he owns, that their crimes were quot;unpardonable particularly as their names were associated with that ofSaddam Hussein.8221;