Top News Stories –

Flawless 100-carat diamond sells for $22.1 million at NY auction –
An eye-popping, 100-carat diamond, the highlight of a magnificent jewels sale in New York on Tuesday, sold for $22.1 million, Sotheby’s auction house said. The perfect classic emerald-cut D color diamond, which is about the size of a walnut and was mined by De Beers in southern Africa, was purchased by an anonymous buyer via a telephone bid. It had a pre-sale estimate of $19 million to $25 million. Gary Schuler, the head of Sotheby’s jewelry department in New York, said the gem is the definition of perfection. The $22.1 million price, which includes the buyer’s premium, fell short of the $30.6 million world record price paid for a 118.28 carat white diamond in Hong Kong in 2013. Sotheby’s said only six perfect diamonds weighing more than 100 carats have been sold at auction in the last 25 years. [Reuters]

AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd pleads guilty to threat to kill –
Phil Rudd, drummer of Australian rock band AC/DC, has changed his plea to guilty on a charge of a threat to kill, at a court in Tauranga, New Zealand. The court heard he was unhappy about his album’s launch party and asked for a former employee to be “taken out”. He had previously denied the charge. He also pleaded guilty to cannabis and methamphetamine possession. Prosecutors dropped a second threat to kill charge, relating to the former employee’s daughter. [BBC] On April 1 2015 AC/DC won their first Grammy.
[Daily Telegraph]
AC/DC

Japan maglev train breaks world speed record again –
A Japanese magnetic levitation train has broken its own world speed record, hitting 603km/h (374mph) in a test run near Mount Fuji. The train beat the 590km/h speed it had set last week in another test. Maglev trains use electrically charged magnets to lift and move carriages above the rail tracks. Central Japan Railway (JR Central), which owns the trains, wants to introduce the service between Tokyo and the central city of Nagoya by 2027. The 280km journey would take only about 40 minutes, less than half the current time. However, passengers will not get to experience the maglev’s record-breaking speeds because the company said its trains will operate at a maximum of 505km/h. In comparison, the fastest operating speed of a Japanese shinkansen, or “bullet train” is is 320km/h. (See Video of the day). [BBC]
The SCMaglev test track in the Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan

Video of the Day –

Yasukazu Endo, the head of the research centre run by Central Japan Railways, discusses the new maglev train. [Guardian]

List of the day –

Vehicle Speed records (as of April 21, 2015 – source Wikipedia)

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Other News Stories –

Armed conflicts and attacks

• War in Somalia (2009–present)
  • A deadly explosion in a Mogadishu restaurant kills at least four people and injures ten others. (Al-Jazeera)
• Yemeni Civil War
  • Saudi Arabia announces that it is ending its bombing campaign in Yemen. (BBC)
• Forty armed men in camouflaged uniforms and speaking Albanian take several police officers hostage in northern Macedonia, the armed men are apparently calling for the creation of “an Albanian state”. The incident was reminiscent of an insurgency in Macedonia in 2001 when Skopje’s security forces battled rebels demanding greater rights for the former Yugoslav republic’s large ethnic Albanian minority. (Reuters)
• Two terrorist groups, ISIS and Taliban, announce Jihad against each other. (MintPress News)

Arts and culture

• Pope Francis accepts the resignation of Robert Finn as bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kansas City–Saint Joseph for failing to report a suspected child abuser. (AP via Yahoo! News)

Disasters and accidents

• Australian east coast low
  • Three people have died in floods in the Australian town of Dungog, New South Wales as heavy rains and cyclonic winds hits the state of New South Wales causing widespread flooding, loss of power to over 100,000 homes and disruption of transport services. (ABC News Australia)

Law and crime

• Former AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd pleads guilty to threatening to kill and drug possession charges in Tauranga, New Zealand. (AP via USA Today)
• April 2015 Mediterranean Sea migrant shipwrecks
  • Italian police arrest the captain and crew member of a vessel that sank in the Mediterranean Sea on Sunday drowning as many as 900 people. (AP)
• An American man Tommy Schaefer is sentenced to 18 years imprisonment in Bali for the murder of his mother-in-law Sheila von Wiese Mack last year. (Sky News Australia)
• An Egyptian court sentences former President Mohammed Morsi to twenty years imprisonment for involvement in the killing of protesters when he was in power. (BBC)
• The U.S. Justice Department has charged Navinder Singh Sarao with commodities fraud and related offenses, alleging that he played a part in theflash crash of May 2010. (Reuters)
• List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, April 2015
  • The United States Department of Justice announces a federal investigation into the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in the city ofBaltimore, Maryland. (AP via The Republic)

• Michele Leonhart announces her retirement as the Administrator of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration with concerns raised about her leadership following a prostitution scandal involving Agency officers having sex with prostitutes provided by drug cartels. (CNN)

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