TWO SOUTH KOREAN EX-SPY CHIEFS ARRESTED OVER CORRUPTION SCANDAL

SEOUL: Two former heads of South Korea’s spy agency were arrested Friday on suspicion of paying millions of dollars in bribes to aides of ousted president Park Geun-Hye, as a widening corruption scandal rocks the country. Nam Jae-Joon and Lee Byung-Kee, ex-heads of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), were arrested for allegedly handing at least 4 billion won ($3.63 million) of their agency’s budget to Park’s aides in monthly payments in exchange for career advancement. The Seoul Central District Court approved the arrest warrants on the two, citing risk of flight and destruction of evidence. Former South Korean leader Park was toppled this year and is in custody while on trial for graft and influence-peddling. Nam and Lee, who respectively served under Park from 2013 to 2015, face charges including embezzlement, bribery and causing losses to state coffers.

SICILIAN MAFIA ‘BEAST’ TOTO RIINA DIES

ROME: Former “boss of bosses” Toto Riina, one of the most feared Godfathers in the history of the Sicilian Mafia, died early Friday after battling cancer, the government said. Riina, who had been serving 26 life sentences and is thought to have ordered more than 150 murders, had been in a medically-induced coma after his health deteriorated following two operations. The mobster, who turned 87 on Thursday, died in the prisoners’ wing of a hospital in Parma in northern Italy just before 4 a.m. (0300 GMT), a ministry of justice spokesman told Agence France-presse. Nicknamed “The Beast” because of his cruelty, Salvatore “Toto” Riina led a reign of terror for decades after taking control of the island’s powerful organized crime group Cosa Nostra in the 1970s. The most high-profile murders he ordered were those in 1992 of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo