Japan's Fisheries Agency seized a Taiwanese long-line fishing boat Tuesday on suspicion of illegally operating in the country's 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone south of the Sakishima Islands in Okinawa Prefecture. The agency released the boat after the captain admitted to having operated without permission outside the bilaterally agreed area and submitted a document to guarantee the payment of cash collateral.

Ten striking chrome miners were shot and wounded with rubber bullets in a dawn clash with mine security on Tuesday, South African police and unions said. Some 500 miners at a small chrome mine in the restive Rustenburg mining region northwest of the country staged a picket around 5:00 am (0300 GMT). Security guards used rubber bullets to disperse the group, who work at a mine owned by the German-based chemical group Lanxess. "Ten of them were injured and taken to the mine hospital," regional police spokesman Thulani Ngubane told AFP.

Russia's federal guard service launched an investigation after photos appeared in the media of a disgraced former employee posing behind Vladimir Putin's desk in the Kremlin, an official said Tuesday. Pictures of the man, named Alexei Ustimchuk, sitting diminutively behind the giant desk in Putin's Kremlin office, spread through the internet as people ridiculed the lack of security that permitted a simple employee such access.

Bulgarian former football star turned mayor Yordan Lechkov was acquitted on appeal on Tuesday after receiving a two-year jail term for mismanagement and abuse of power, a court said. The court of appeal in the central city of Plovdiv overturned the previous ruling of the Stara Zagora regional court, which had found Lechkov guilty of signing an unprofitable water and sewerage deal and pressuring a tax official.