BEIRUT

Iran denounces Turkey for seeking Patriot missiles

Iran lashed out Friday at Turkey for requesting that NATO supply it with Patriot surface-to-air missiles to deploy along the border with Syria, denouncing the step by Ankara as counterproductive.

Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani made the remarks after a visit to Damascus, a show of support by Tehran to its increasingly diplomatically isolated ally.

“The internal crisis in Syria cannot be solved through the deployment of such weapons,” Larijani, who is close to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, said at a news conference in Beirut where he went after leaving Syria.

Turkey’s request this week follows several incidents in which violence has spilled across the border from the civil war in Syria, frequently mortar rounds falling a short distance inside. Patriots would be useful in intercepting ballistic missiles — a much more serious but still hypothetical threat.

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HELENA, MONT.

Restaurant settles suit over erroneous phonebook listing

A phone book company has settled a lawsuit over its placement of a Montana restaurant in the “Animal Carcass Removal” section of its yellow pages, a listing the restaurant owner says cost him customers and made him the butt of a Jay Leno joke.

The terms of the Nov. 16 deal between Dex Media Inc. and Big Sky Beverage Inc., the parent company of Bar 3 Bar-B-Q, were not disclosed. A tentative agreement proposed in September said a deal would include a payment to the restaurant owner.

Owner Hunter Lacey sued Dex after the listing appeared in the 2009 phone book and was reprinted in other print and online directories in 2010 and last year. It gained national notoriety after Leno featured it as a joke on the Tonight Show in January 2011.

Lacey’s lawsuit claims a Dex salesman deliberately published the free listing under the “Animal Carcass Removal” section after he refused to buy an ad in the phone book. The salesman no longer works for the company.

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ELMIRA, N.Y.

1943 Postcard arrives albeit almost seven decades late

A postcard mailed nearly 70 years ago has finally arrived at the former upstate New York home of the couple who sent it.

The postcard was sent July 4, 1943, from Rockford, Ill., to sisters Pauline and Theresa Leisenring in Elmira.

Their brother, George Leisenring, was stationed at Rockford’s Medical Center Barracks at Camp Grant, an Army post during World War II. Their parents were visiting him when they mailed the postcard home.

The postcard reads in part, “Dear Pauline and Theresa, We arrived safe, had a good trip, but we were good and tired.”

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Elmira’s Star-Gazette newspaper reported the postcard arrived last week at the family’s former home, where a different family now lives.

VIENNA, Austria

Truck thieves make getaway with 18 tons of milk chocolate

Thieves with a huge sweet-tooth have driven off with 18 tons of chocolate in Austria.

State broadcaster ORF says on its website that the driver of a Slovak tractor trailer loaded the 33 pallets of milk chocolate onto his vehicle from the producer in the western town of Bludenz this week — supposedly to deliver an order from a company in the Czech Republic. But police say the license plates and papers of the Slovak truck and driver were apparently counterfeit. As of Friday, the delivery was still outstanding.

— From news service reports


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