‘PLAYBOY PRIEST’ FLEES WITH 1 MN EUROS, MARRIED WOMAN
ZAGREB: A Croatian priest has run off with almost one million euros ($1.3 million) after illegally selling church property, officials said, amid media reports the Catholic clergyman had fled with a married woman.

Franciscan priest Sime Nimac earlier this year signed a deal with a local firm to sell a plot of church land, the Split archdiocese said in statement. Nimac, 34, the former parish priest of Baska Voda on the southern Adriatic coast, in May withdrew more than 980,000 euros in cash from the parish’s account “without a valid explanation why the money was taken and what it will be used for,” the archdiocese added. Local media have reported that the priest, described as a handsome aficionado of expensive clothes and luxury goods, had fled the country with a young woman who is a married employee of the bank from which the cash was withdrawn.The property had been sold without church authorities’ written approval, and the Franciscans have filed a suit to annul the deal.

$330,000 FOUND IN JAPAN VACANT HOUSE DEMOLITION
TOKYO: Construction workers dismantling a vacant house in rural Japan discovered $330,000 cash stuffed in a tin box underneath the living room floor, press reports said on Wednesday. The house, in a farming town on the northern island of Hokkaido, had been empty since its elderly male owner died two years ago, the reports said. The cash—about 2,600 notes each worth 10,000 yen bundled together or put in envelopes—will be handed over to the dead man’s relatives on the main Japanese island of Honshu, the reports said.

AUSTRIAN GRANNY, 82, TAKES ON ARMED BANK ROBBER
VIENNA: An 82-year-old Austrian grandmother took on a bank robber who was armed with a gun and a home-made bomb, newspapers reported on Wednesday. Hertha Wallecker ripped the thief’s mask off his head and tore a bag containing cash he had stolen out of his hand, shouting: “The money belongs to the bank.” The robber, identified later as Gerhard P., 62, fled the bank in the village of Sankt Egyden, in eastern Austria, empty-handed and was arrested later in the day. “Maybe I watch too many police series on television,” the heroine told the Oesterreich daily. “There were also men there, standing around. None of them lifted a finger.”

PAKISTAN FLOODS KILL 455, AFFECT FIVE MILLION
ISLAMABAD: Monsoon floods in Pakistan have killed 455 people over the past five weeks and affected more than five million, according to the latest figures from the government’s disaster relief agency. Pakistan suffered devastating floods in the past two years, including the worst in its history in 2010 when catastrophic inundations across the country killed almost 1,800 people and affected 21 million. AFP