Fidel Castro said Wednesday he is not yet healthy enough to address Cuba’s people in person and can’t campaign for Sunday’s parliamentary elections. “I am not physically able to speak directly to the citizens of the municipality where I was nominated for our elections,” the ailing 81-year-old wrote in an essay published by state news media. He has not been seen in public since July 2006, when emergency intestinal surgery forced Castro to cede power to a provisional government headed by his brother Raul, five years his junior.\nA Swedish bomb squad called out to disarm a suspicious package on Wednesday did not find a ticking bomb. But they did find a vibrating sex toy. A janitor alerted police after he found the package in a garage of an apartment building in Goteborg, the country’s second-largest city, police spokesman Jan Strannegard said. The package was humming and vibrating suspiciously, so police took no chances and sent out a team of explosives experts. After having cordoned off the area, they opened the package with bomb disposal equipment, only to find the battery-operated device inside.
A Paris court convicted French oil giant Total SA Wednesday on charges of maritime pollution over the 1999 sinking of the tanker Erika, which caused France’s worst oil spill. The criminal court fined Total $560,000, the maximum penalty on that charge. It acquitted the company on a separate charge of complicity in endangering people and property.
European stocks fell Wednesday following steep slides in Asian shares amid growing speculation the U.S. economy - a vital export market - could slide into a recession. Investors in Europe and Asia dumped stocks after an overnight sell-off on Wall Street and on news that Citigroup Inc. had lost nearly $10 billion in the fourth quarter as it wrote down mountains of bad mortgage assets - the latest fallout from the credit crisis. Weak U.S. retail sales figures added to the gloom.
