Postcards from the edge
South Korea’s former president Roh Moo-hyun, 62, jumped off a 30-m cliff to his death on Saturday, apparently unable to bear the shame of a multi-million-dollar corruption scandal in which he was embroiled. Roh was under investigation for allegedly accepting $6 million in bribes from a businessman while he served as leader of the country between 2003 and 2008. In a note found on his computer, Roh wrote, “What’s left for me for the rest of my life is just to be a burden to others. Don’t be too sad. Aren’t life and death both part of nature? Don’t blame anyone. It’s destiny.” Mourners lined the streets in Seoul to pay their respects to the popular leader, a self-made man from an impoverished background. On the same day, in China, another man, Chen Fuchao, stood on a bridge contemplating suicide after a failed construction project had landed him almost US$300,000 in debt. Chen’s struggle had kept traffic around the Haizhu bridge in the city of Guangzhou snarled for five hours. Police had barricaded the area. A 66-year-old man named Lai Jiansheng made his way through the barricade, approached Chen, shook his hand, and pushed him off the bridge himself. “I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish,” he later said. “They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities’ attention to their appeals.” Lai was apprehended by police and later released on bail. Chen survived the eight-metre fall onto an emergency air cushion and is recovering in hospital.
What was for lunch?
Oprah Winfrey reportedly headlined a top-secret, philanthropy-themed summit of America’s wealthiest citizens held recently in New York, according to the New York Times. In attendance at the appropriately selected venue—Rockefeller University on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—were celebrity billionaires including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros and Ted Turner. “Essentially, it was a brainstorming session where people who are very charitable talked about charity in today’s economic climate,” said Karen Denne, a spokesperson for philanthropist Eli Broad, who also attended the private meeting. Details of how the event came about were kept tightly under wraps, and for good reason: the estimated net worth of the room was about US$120 billion or, as the Times put it, just shy of the annual budget of New York state.
Royal sting
Brian Sirjusingh, a part-time chauffeur for Britain’s royal family, has been suspended and is under investigation by Buckingham Palace officials after he allegedly brought two undercover reporters on a “tour” of a secure area of the building after they offered him a bribe of about $1,800. The reporters, both employees of the News of the World newspaper, said they were waved through a police checkpoint, without security checks, and were shown the royal garage, where one reporter said he was allowed to sit in a Bentley used to transport Queen Elizabeth II on special occasions. “There have been a number of security breaches at the palace over the years,” said the News of the World’s royal editor Robert Jobson, defending the stunt, “but this is right up there in terms of being a flagrant breach of security . . . It could easily have been a terrorist walking into the palace and planting a bomb in the car.”
He did last a very long time
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Robert Furchgott, whose discovery that nitric oxide could help enlarge blood vessels was a major factor in the invention of Pfizer’s erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, died last Tuesday in Seattle. He was 92.
The mysterious affair in Qazvin
A 32-year-old woman identified only as Mahin is being described by Iranian police as the country’s first female serial killer. Mahin reportedly confessed to police to borrowing her modus operandi from the plots of Agatha Christie, whose classic mystery novels are extremely popular in Iran. She is accused of killing at least six people, most of whom were middle-aged and elderly women. She would offer them a ride in her car, give them fruit juice spiked with a drug to render them unconscious, then suffocate them and steal their money and valuables. According to Ali Akbar Hedayati, the police chief of the city of Qazvin, Mahin suffers from a mental disorder that is the result of having been deprived of her mother’s love.
Pages: 1 2
