$1,300 coin handed to Salvation Army bell ringer

$1,300 coin handed to Salvation Army bell ringer

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A platinum coin estimated to be worth more than $1,000 couldn’t fit in a Salvation Army kettle, so the donor handed it over to the bell ringer. An unidentified person donated the coin Friday outside a Belk department store. The coin’s face value is $100, but the Salvation Army had it appraised, and initial estimates put its value at about $1,300. The coin is from 2006 and is stamped with an image of the Statue of Liberty.

The Salvation Army has also received at least eight gold coins in its kettles this year. One, a one-ounce South African Krugerrand worth about $800, turned up earlier this month in Washington. And gold coins have turned up all the way back to 1982, the group said. Salvation Army officials also have reported getting an Indian head gold coin in Barre, Vt., one-ounce American Eagle coins in Prescott, Ariz., and Fargo, N.D., and a Lady Liberty coin in Grand Island, Neb., among other unusual coins.

Bullet in lung 29 years

HANOI, Vietnam — Doctors have safely removed a bullet that had been painlessly lodged in a Vietnamese man’s lung for nearly three decades, his surgeon said Monday. Doctors at Thanh Hoa hospital removed the bullet and presented it to Vu Van Thanh, 50, about two weeks ago. The AR15 bullet had been stuck in his lung since he was shot while fighting in neighboring Cambodia in 1978.

Thanh, a farmer, wanted to remove the bullet a long time ago but could not afford the operation. He did not feel any pain for the last 30 years, said Thi Tu village head, Nguyen Van Thai, where Thanh lives. He recently found it hard to breathe and had several fevers. Doctors at the hospital, 100 miles south of Hanoi, performed the surgery for free.

Bomb attack thwarted

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkish police thwarted a bomb attack in Istanbul on Monday, arresting a 25-year-old man with explosives in his backpack outside a subway station, the city’s governor said. The man was carrying more than seven pounds of plastic A-4 explosives when he was arrested in the Sisli district, one of the most crowded areas of the city, Turkish news agencies reported.

Guler said police raided an apartment believed to be used as a safe house and seized more explosives and various equipment that could be used to set off a bomb. He said a woman and two children living in the apartment were being questioned.

Militant Kurdish, leftist and Islamic groups have carried out bombings in big cities and in resort towns in Turkey. In May, a 28-year-old man convicted of membership in a militant leftist group blew himself up in Turkey’s capital, killing six people and injuring dozens.

Election lacks credibility

MOSCOW — Uzbekistan’s authoritarian President Islam Karimov, who has ruled the Central Asian nation for nearly two decades, has won another seven-year term with 88.1 percent of the votes, according to early returns released by Central Election Commission on Monday — an election critics dismissed as a sham. Karimov faced three other contenders in the vote Sunday, but all of them publicly supported him. The election-monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the election failed to meet an array of democratic standards.

Uzbekistan, a predominantly Muslim nation of 27 million, is a member of the OSCE — which aims to promote democratic standards — but is one of the most politically repressive of the former Soviet states. Most of Karimov’s opponents have been sent to jail or into exile, and authorities have muzzled news media. The Associated Press and some other international news organizations were denied accreditation to cover the election.

Monarchy no longer

KATMANDU, Nepal — The world’s last Hindu monarchy is to be swept aside under an agreement between Nepal’s former communist rebels and its major political parties that sets the stage for the country once idealized as a Himalayan Shangri La to become a republic. If it holds, the accord may finally bring a measure of peace and stability that has long eluded this impoverished, near-feudal wonderland for backpackers and mountain climbers looking to scale Mount Everest and other peaks.

At the center of much of Nepal’s turmoil has been King Gyanendra, the often-dour and widely reviled head of a dynasty that for centuries held absolute sway over the country — a primacy he sought to reassert nearly two years ago when he dismissed parliament and seized dictatorial powers. The power grab was his undoing.

Associated Press