Danny Puff

LONDON (AP) As the world joined Americans in mourning the school massacre in Connecticut , many urged U.S. politicians to honor the 28 victims, especially the children, by pushing for stronger gun control laws .

Twitter users and media personalities in the U.K. immediately invoked Dunblane a 1996 shooting in that small Scottish town which killed 16 children. That tragedy prompted a campaign that ultimately led to tighter gun controls effectively making it illegal to buy or possess a handgun in the U.K.

"This is America's Dunblane," British CNN host Piers Morgan wrote on Twitter. "We banned handguns in Britain after that appalling tragedy. What will the U.S. do? Inaction not an option."

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard called Friday's attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a "senseless and incomprehensible act of evil."

"Like President Obama and his fellow Americans, our hearts too are broken," Gillard said in a statement, referring to the U.S. leader's emotional expression of condolence.

Australia confronted a similar tragedy in 1996, when a man went on a shooting spree in the southern state of Tasmania, killing 35 people. The mass killing sparked outrage across the country and led the government to impose strict new gun laws, including a ban on semi-automatic rifles.

Rupert Murdoch recalled that incident in a Twitter message calling the shootings "terrible news" and asking "when will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy."

The mass shooting in Connecticut left 28 people dead, including 20 children. The gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, killed his mother at their home Friday before beginning his deadly rampage inside the school in Newtown, then committed suicide, police said.

Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Union's executive Commission, said: "Young lives full of hope have been destroyed. On behalf of the European Commission and on my own behalf, I want to express my sincere condolences to the families of the victims of this terrible tragedy."

British Prime Minister David Cameron, said he was "deeply saddened" to learn of the "horrific shooting."

"My thoughts are with the injured and those who have lost loved ones," he said. "It is heartbreaking to think of those who have had their children robbed from them at such a young age, when they had so much life ahead of them."

Queen Elizabeth II sent a message to President Barack Obama , saying she was shocked to learn of the "dreadful loss of life" and that the thoughts and prayers of all in the U.K. are with those affected by the events.

The Vatican said Pope Benedict XVI conveyed "his heartfelt grief and the assurance of his closeness in prayer to the victims and their families, and to all those affected by the shocking event" in a condolence message to the monsignor of the diocese in Connecticut that includes Newtown.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her "deepest sympathy" is reserved for relatives of the victims.

"Once again we stand aghast at a deed that cannot be comprehended," she said in a statement. "The thought of the murdered pupils and teachers makes my heart heavy."

But amid the messages of condolences, much of the discussion after the Connecticut rampage centered on gun control a baffling subject for many in Asia and Europe, where mass shootings also have occurred but where access to guns is much more heavily restricted.

In messages to Obama, French President Francois Hollande said he was "horrified" by the shooting while Prince Albert II in the tiny principality of Monaco expressed sadness over the "unspeakable tragedy."

Russian leader Vladimir Putin called the events "particularly tragic" given that the majority of the victims were children. " Vladimir Putin asked Barack Obama to convey words of support and sympathy to the families and friends of the victims and expressed his empathy with the American people," the Kremlin said in a statement.

Father Giuseppe Piemontese an Assisi-based official of the Franciscan order, founded to further the cause of peace lamented that there are "so many, too many" tragic shootings that "raise the question about the ease with which you can legally procure arms in the United States, to then use them in a murderous way."

The attack quickly dominated public discussion in China, rocketing to the top of topic lists on social media and becoming the top story on state television's main noon newscast.

China has seen several rampage attacks at schools in recent years, though the attackers there usually use knives and not guns. The most recent attack happened Friday, when a knife-wielding man injured 22 children and one adult outside a primary school in central China.

With more than 100,000 Chinese studying in U.S. schools, a sense of shared grief came through.

"Parents with children studying in the U.S. must be tense. School shootings happen often in the U.S. Can't politicians put away politics and prohibit gun sales?" Zhang Xin, a wealthy property developer, wrote on her feed on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo service, where she has 4.9 million followers.

Some in South Korea, whose government does not allow people to possess guns privately, also blamed a lack of gun control in the United States for the high number of deaths in Connecticut .

Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's top daily, speculated in an online report that it appears "inevitable" that the shooting will prompt the U.S. government to consider tighter gun control .

In Thailand, which has one of Asia's highest rates of murder by firearms and has seen schools attacked by Islamist insurgents in its southern provinces, a columnist for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation blamed American culture for fostering a climate of violence.

"Repeated incidents of gunmen killing innocent people have shocked the Americans or us, but also made most people ignore it quickly," Thanong Khanthong wrote on Twitter. "Intentionally or not, Hollywood and video games have prepared people's mind to see killings and violence as normal and acceptable," he wrote.

Condolences poured in also from Baghdad.

"We feel sorry for the victims and their families," said Hassan Sabah, 30, owner of stationary shop in eastern Baghdad. "This tragic incident shows there is no violence-free society in the world, even in Western and non-Muslim countries."

Samir Abdul-Karim, a 40-year-old government employee from eastern Baghdad said the attack "shows clearly that U.S. society is not perfect and the Americans do have people with criminal minds and who are ready to kill for the silliest reasons."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed his condolences to the American nation at the start of his remarks in Kabul on Saturday about Afghanistan's foreign policy.

"Such incidents should not happen anywhere in the world," Karzai said, adding that Afghanistan frequently witnesses such tragedies and can sympathize with those affected.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed those sentiments in a letter to Obama expressing his horror at the "savage massacre," saying that his country knows the "shock and agony" such cruel acts can bring.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda sent a condolence message to Obama for the families of the victims.

"The sympathy of the Japanese people is with the American people," he said. In Japan, guns are severely restricted and there are extremely few gun-related crimes.

In the Philippines, a society often afflicted by gun violence, President Benigno Aquino III said he and the Filipino people stand beside the United States "with bowed heads, yet in deep admiration over the manner in which the American people have reached out to comfort the afflicted, and to search for answers that will give meaning and hope to this grim event."

Close to 50 people gathered Saturday on Rio de Janeiro's famous Copacabana beach to mourn the victims as part of a demonstration organized by an anti-violence group called Rio de Paz, or Rio of Peace.

Twenty-six black crosses were planted on the white sands of the beach one for each victim at the school. Messages of solidarity written in English hung from some the crosses.

One of them read: "In Brazil we understand the pain of senseless violence. We grieve the pain at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut."

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Associated Press writers Grant Peck and Thanyarat Doksone in Bangkok, Tais Vilela in Rio de Janeiro, Kristen Gelineau in Sydney, Malcolm Foster and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Charles Hutzler in Beijing, Sam Kim in Seoul, South Korea, Oliver Teves in Manila, Philippines, Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad, Don Melvin in Brussels, Jim Heintz in Moscow, Frances D'Emilio in Rome, Deb Riechmann in Kabul and Tia Goldenberg in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

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PARIS (Reuters) - Actor Gerard Depardieu 's decision to establish residency in Belgium, which does not have a wealth tax , by buying a house just over the border with France , is "pathetic" and unpatriotic, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Wednesday.

Depardieu has become the latest wealthy Frenchman after luxury magnate Bernard Arnault to look for shelter outside his native country following tax hikes by Socialist President Francois Hollande.

"Going just over the border, I find that fairly pathetic," Ayrault said on France 2 television. "Being a Frenchman means loving your country and helping it to get back on its feet."

The "Cyrano de Bergerac" star bought a house in the Belgian village of Nechin near the border with France, where 27 percent of the population is composed of French nationals, local mayor Daniel Senesael told French media on Sunday.

Depardieu also enquired about procedures for acquiring Belgian residency, he said.

Yann Galut , a Socialist member of parliament, condemned the actor and proposed that France copy U.S. practice by adopting a law that would force exiles to pay full tax dues or risk being stripped of their nationality.

"It is scandalous and shameful," Galut told Reuters in an interview.

"The country's in dire straits. This man owes everything he has to France - the accolades, the subsidies that helped produce his films, the schools where he was educated. At the end of a career that made him extremely rich he wants nothing to do with national solidarity."

Belgian residents do not pay wealth tax, which in France is now slapped on individuals with assets over 1.3 million euros ($1.70 million), nor do they pay capital gains tax on share sales. France has also imposed a 75-percent tax on incomes exceeding 1 million euros.

The tax hikes have been welcomed by left-wingers who say the rich must do more to help redress public finances but attacked by some wealthy personalities and foreign critics, who say it will increase tax flight and dampen investment.

Depardieu's move comes three months after Arnault, chief executive of luxury giant LVMH, caused an uproar by seeking to establish residency in Belgium - a move he said was not motivated by tax reasons.

The left-leaning Liberation daily reacted with a front-page headline next a photograph of Arnault telling him to "Get lost, you rich jerk", prompting luxury advertisers including LVMH to withdraw their advertisements.

Ayrault said he did not support the idea floated by Galut, and the call was also partially disowned by the leader of the Socialist group in the lower house of parliament.

"I'd rather appeal to people's intelligence, to their hearts," Ayrault said.

Undeterred, Galut said tax dodging may be costing the state as much as 6 to 8 billion euros ($7.8 to 10.4 billion) a year in lost income and that such amounts were "far from negligible" at a time when France is at pains to reduce a bloated debt.

"Everyone is being asked to chip in, private individuals and companies alike. It's inadmissible that people who made fortunes in France refuse to share their part of the burden," he said.

Galut said he was asked on Wednesday to set up a parliamentary panel that would look into the question of tax exiles, saying he would like to see action taken when parliament broaches a budget bill for 2014.

($1 = 0.7669 euros)

(Editing by Jon Boyle and Louise Heavens)

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NEW DELHI (AP) The walls of Sanjay Sharma 's music shop are lined with gleaming string instruments and old photographs of legendary musicians.

Beatles George Harrison , John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Indian classicial musicians Zakir Hussain, Shiv Kumar Sharma and Vishwamohan Bhatt. And the man who brought these two very different musical worlds together: Ravi Shankar .

Like his grandfather and father before him, Sharma built, tuned and repaired instruments for the sitar virtuoso, who introduced Westerners to Indian classical music , and through his friendship with Harrison became a mainstay of the 1960s counterculture scene.

From his tiny shop tucked into the crowded lanes of central Delhi's Bhagat Singh market, Sharma traveled the world with Shankar. Late in the maestro's life, as his health and strength flagged, he even designed a smaller version of the instrument that allowed him to keep playing.

Shankar, who died Tuesday at age 92, was "a saint, an emperor and lord of music," Sharma says in a tribute posted to the website of his sought-after shop, Rikhi Ram's Music.

"When I opened my eyes there was him," says Sharma, 44, surrounded by display cases full of sitars, sarangis (a stringed instrument played with a violin-like bow), guitars, tabla drums and sarods, a deeply resonating instrument played by plucking the strings.

Shankar "was music and music was him," he says.

Sharma's grandfather started the business in 1920 in the northern city of Lahore, now in Pakistan. He met a young Ravi Shankar at a concert there in the 1940s. Following the India-Pakistan partition and the relocation of the shop to New Delhi, the family began making sitars for Shankar in the 1950s.

By then, the musician was already famous in India and beginning to collaborate with some of the greats of Western music, including violinist Yehudi Menuhin and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.

The Beatles visited in 1966 and bought instruments, memorialized in some of the many photographs that line the shop's walls. Another shows Shankar's daughter and the heir of his sitar legacy, Anoushka Shankar . But there is no picture of another Shankar daughter, American singer Norah Jones, who was estranged from her father.

Sharma's own father succeeded his grandfather as the supplier of Shankar's sitars. And then Sharma himself in the 1980s.

The bedroom-sized shop has two counters, one for conducting business and one for working on instruments under the beam of a large work lamp. Wood shavings and dust cover the floor of a workshop at the back.

As he chatted with visiting Associated Press journalists on Thursday, Sharma worked on a sitar , peering through his glasses as he used a mallet to hammer in a new fret. He plucked the strings, and as the sound resonated around the room, he leaned close in to the instrument and listened intently to the vibrations. Satisfied with the results, he moved on to the next fret.

It takes 15 months for a sitar to be ready for use. The actual crafting of the instrument from red cedar and hollowed-out, dried pumpkins takes three months. Then, it is left untouched to go through what is called "Delhi seasoning," in which the extremes of New Delhi's climate blistering summer, followed by a brief monsoon, and a near-freezing, three-month winter work their magic.

In 2005, a serious bout of pneumonia left Shankar with a frozen left shoulder.

"He was growing old and he wanted to experiment and change the instrument" so he could continue playing, Sharma says.

Sharma, a large, balding man, created what he calls the "studio sitar," a smaller version of the instrument. But holding it was still difficult. So Sharma went to a Home Depot near Shankar's San Diego, California-area home and bought some supplies to build a detachable stand.

The musician was thrilled. Sharma says Shankar told him, "Your father was a brilliant sitar maker, but you are a genius."

Shankar was performing in public until a month before his death. Despite ill health, he appeared re-energized by the music, Sharma said.

Now, as Sharma mourns the giant of Indian music , he also worries about the future of the art itself. He sees traditional Indian instruments gradually losing their place in their own country to zippy, electronic Bollywood music.

"We are losing the originality and the core of our Indian music ," says Shankar, himself a trained Hindustani classical musician who plays the sitar and tabla, the Indian pair-drums.

At the same time, Shankar's work as a global ambassador of music has borne fruit, Sharma says: "Because the music has gone to the West, we're getting lots of new musical aspirants from the Western countries."

When jazz artist Herbie Hancock was in New Delhi a few years ago, he stopped by Sharma's shop to buy a sitar.

And in one of the shop's display windows gleams a newly crafted sitar made of teak.

"That," Sharma said, "is for Bill Gates."

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NEW YORK (AP) The U.S. premiere of the Tom Cruise action movie " Jack Reacher " is being postponed following the deadly Connecticut school shooting .

Paramount Pictures says "out of honor and respect for the families of the victims" the premiere won't take place Saturday in Pittsburgh, where "Jack Reacher" was filmed.

The premiere would've been Cruise's first U.S. media appearance since his split from Katie Holmes over the summer. It was to be more contained with select outlets covering and a location away from Hollywood or New York.

A proclamation ceremony for Cruise had been planned with Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.

No new date for the premiere has been set. The movie opens Dec. 21.

Friday's massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school killed 20 children and several adults.

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LONDON (AP) What do you get the woman who has everything? Britain's Royal Academy of Arts has presented Queen Elizabeth II with works by some of the country's leading artists to mark the monarch's 60 years on the throne.

The 97 works on paper include a royal portrait by Tracey Emin , a celebratory Diamond Jubilee drawing done on an iPad by David Hockney and pieces by Antony Gormley , Anish Kapoor and Grayson Perry.

All the artists are members of the Royal Academy , the elite artistic society founded in 1768.

The artworks will go on public display at Buckingham Palace next year.

Martin Clayton, senior curator of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, on Friday called the gift "a vivid cross-section of the best of contemporary British art."

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MILWAUKEE (AP) The vast collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts initially sold senior Joe Kirchoff on Marquette University , so when the school offered its first course devoted exclusively to the English author, Kirchoff wanted in. The only problem: It was full and he wasn't on the literature track.

Undaunted, the 22-year-old political science and history major lobbied the English department and others starting last spring and through the summer and "kind of just made myself a problem," he said. His persistence paid off.

"It's a fantastic course," said Kirchoff, a Chicago native. "It's a great way to look at something that's such a creative work of genius in such a way you really come to understand the man behind it."

He and the 31 other students can now boast of their authority about the author who influenced much of today's high fantasy writing. The course was taught for the first time this fall as part of the university's celebration of the 75th anniversary of " The Hobbit " being published. And class wrapped up just before the film, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," was released Friday.

The class, which filled up fast with mostly seniors who had first dibs, looked at Tolkien as a whole, not just the popular " Lord of the Rings " and "The Hobbit." Students took their final exam this week, and the course was so well received, Marquette is considering more in the future.

"It's the best class I've had in 27 years here ... for student preparation, interest and enthusiasm," said English professor Tim Machan. "And I can throw out any topic and they will have read the material and they want to talk about the material."

Marquette is one of the main repositories of Tolkien's drafts, drawings and other writings more than 11,000 pages. It has the manuscripts for "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit," as well as his lesser-known "Farmer Giles of Ham" and his children's book "Mr. Bliss." Marquette was the first institution to ask Tolkien for the manuscripts in 1956 and paid him about $5,000.

The university acquired the collection after it hired William Ready in 1956 to build its literary collection. Ready, who became interested in Tolkien after reading "The Hobbit," in turn hired Bertram Rota, a London rare book dealer, to serve as the agent for Marquette.

Rota wrote to Tolkien and asked for his original manuscripts. Tolkien happened to be worried about his retirement finances and agreed to the sale. Tolkien died in 1973.

Ready left Marquette in 1963 to head the library at McMaster University in Ontario. The department of special collections and archives is now named for him. Ready died in 1981.

Other significant collections are at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England and Wheaton College in Illinois.

Though Tolkien classes aren't unusual nationwide, Marquette students had the added bonus of being able to visit Tolkien's revisions, notes, detailed calendars, maps and watercolors on site at the school's archive. And they got a lesson from the school's archivist Bill Fliss.

"One of the things we wanted to impress upon the students was the fact that Tolkien was a fanatical reviser," said Fliss said. "He never really did anything once and was finished with it."

Chrissy Wabiszewski, a senior English major, described Tolkien's manuscripts as art.

"When you get down and look at just his script and his artwork in general, it all kind of flows together in this really beautiful, like, cumulative form," Wabiszewski said. "It's cool. It is just really cool to have it here."

The class also looked at Tolkien's poetry, academic articles and translations of medieval poems; talked about the importance of his writers' group, the Inklings; and explored what it meant to be a writer at that time.

"We've ... tried to think about continuities that ran through everything he did," Machan said. His students were also required to go to three lectures that were part of Marquette's commemoration.

"The Hobbit," a tale of homebody Bilbo Baggins' journey, is set in Tolkien's fictional realm of Middle-earth and takes place 60 years before "The Lord of the Rings." The movie released Friday is the first of the trilogy, with "The Hobbit: There and Back Again" set for release on Dec. 13, 2013, and a third film to come out in the summer of 2014.

Most of the students were just finishing elementary school when the first "Lord of the Rings" film was released 11 years ago.

Kirchoff said he started reading "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" when he was in fourth grade, before the movies came out. He said the movies have introduced others to Tolkien's ideas, making his love for Tolkien's fantasy worlds more socially acceptable.

"The movies were fantastic enough and engaging enough to coexist in my mind with the literature I really do love," he said.

Wabiszewski said it's clear her classmates weren't just taking the class as a filler.

"I definitely expected the enthusiasm from everybody but just the knowledge that everybody brought into the class, it's cool," she said. "We really have a smart group of people in that class who have a lot to offer."

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YORK, Maine (AP) Sally Struthers has entered a not guilty plea on charges she drove drunk in Maine , where she was performing in a musical.

The Portland Press Herald (http://bit.ly/XleJBq) reports the 65-year-old Struthers did not appear in York District Court on Thursday, and entered the plea through her lawyer.

Police arrested Struthers on Sept. 12 on U.S. Route 1 in the resort town Ogunquit (oh-GUHNG'-kwit). She was charged with criminal operating under the influence.

Struthers is best known for her role as Gloria Stivic in the 1970s TV sitcom "All in the Family." She had been performing at the Ogunquit Playhouse in the musical "9 to 5."

Struthers is scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 13 for a bench trial.

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Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com

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PHOENIX (AP) The company and the man who runs the business that owns a luxury jet that crashed and killed Latin music star Jenni Rivera is under investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration , and the agency seized two of its planes earlier this year as part of the ongoing probe.

DEA spokeswoman Lisa Webb Johnson confirmed Thursday the planes owned by Las Vegas-based Starwood Management were seized in Texas and Arizona, but she declined to discuss details of the case. The agency also has subpoenaed all the company's records, including any correspondence it has had with a former Tijuana mayor who U.S. law enforcement officials have long suspected has ties to organized crime.

Christian Esquino , 50, who runs the business and has a long and checkered legal past, told The Associated Press on Friday that the DEA has been investigating him for more than 20 years but has yet to prove a single drug-related charge. Esquino said his sister-in-law owns the company but he has the "expertise."

His legal woes date back decades. He pleaded guilty to a fraud charge that stemmed from a major drug investigation in Florida in the early 1990s and most recently was sentenced to two years in federal prison in a California aviation fraud case. Esquino, a Mexican citizen, was deported upon his release. He and various other companies he has either been involved with or owns have also been sued for failing to pay millions of dollars in loans, according to court records.

The 43-year-old California-born Rivera died at the peak of her career when the plane she was traveling in nose-dived into the ground while flying from the northern Mexican city of Monterrey to the central city of Toluca early Sunday morning. She was perhaps the most successful female singer in grupero, a male-dominated Mexico regional style, and had branched out into acting and reality television.

Esquino said in a telephone interview from Mexico City Friday night that the singer was considering buying the aircraft from Starwood for $250,000 and the flight was offered as a test ride. The 78-year-old pilot and five other people were also killed.

The late singer's brother, Pedro Rivera Jr. , confirmed Friday that his sister died in the crash.

Esquino is no stranger to tangles with the law, and his business dealings have come under increased media scrutiny since the crash.

He was indicted in the early 1990s along with 12 other defendants in a major federal drug investigation that claimed the suspects planned to sell more than 480 kilograms of cocaine, according to court records. He eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal money from the IRS and was sentenced to five years in prison, but he served just about five months.

Cynthia Hawkins, a former assistant U.S. attorney who handled the case and is now in private practice in Orlando, remembered the investigation well.

"It was huge," Hawkins said Thursday. "This was an international smuggling group."

She said the case began with the arrest of Robert Castoro , who was at the time considered one of the most prolific smugglers of marijuana and cocaine into Florida from direct ties to Colombian drug cartels in the 1980s. Castoro was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to life in prison, but he then began cooperating with authorities, leading to his sentence being reduced to just 10 years, Hawkins said.

"Castoro cooperated for years," she said. "We put hundreds of people in jail."

He eventually gave up another smuggler, Damian Tedone, who was indicted in the early 1990s along with Esquino and 11 others in a conspiracy involving drug smuggling in Florida in the 1980s at a time when the state was the epicenter of the nation's cocaine trade.

Tedone also cooperated with authorities and has since been released from prison. Telephone messages left for both Tedone and Castoro have not been returned.

Esquino eventually pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of concealing money from the IRS. He said he has never had any drug involvement and only pleaded to the charge to avoid a much lengthier sentence in the narcotics case.

Joseph Milchen, Esquino's attorney at the time, said the case eventually revolved around his client "bringing money into the United States without declaring it."

However, Milchen acknowledged that a plane purchased by Esquino was "used to smuggle drugs."

Esquino, too, said he later learned the plane he sold to Castoro for about $220,000 was used to smuggle drugs, but said he had no knowledge of that and was only involved in the aircraft transaction.

"I wasn't any part of that," he told the AP. "I pleaded guilty just to get the DEA off my back."

As for Castoro, who Esquino claims implicated him in the smuggling operation, he said, "He'd throw his own mom under the bus if he could get time off his sentence."

Court filings also indicate Esquino was sentenced to two years in federal prison after pleading guilty in 2004 to committing fraud involving aircraft he purchased in Mexico , then falsified the planes' log books and re-sold them in the United States. He now denies that charge, as well.

Also in 2004, a federal judge ordered him and one of his companies to pay a creditor $6.2 million after being accused of failing to pay debts to a bank.

As the years passed, Esquino's troubles only grew.

In February this year, a Gulfstream G-1159A plane the government valued at $500,000 Esquino says it's worth $1.5 million was seized by the U.S. Marshals Service on behalf of the DEA after landing in Tucson on a flight that originated in Mexico

Four months later, the DEA subpoenaed all of Starwood's records dating to Dec. 13, 2007, including federal and state income tax documents, bank deposit information, records on all company assets and sales, and the entity's relationship with Esquino and more than a dozen companies and individuals, including former Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank-Rhon, a gambling mogul and a member of one of Mexico's most powerful families. U.S. law enforcement officials have long suspected Hank-Rhon is tied to organized crime but no allegations have been proven. He has consistently denied any criminal involvement.

He was arrested in Mexico last year on weapons charges and on suspicion of ordering the murder of his son's former girlfriend. He was later freed for lack of evidence.

The subpoena was obtained by the U-T San Diego newspaper.

Esquino said Hank-Rhon's involvement with his company was only through renting planes.

In September, the DEA seized another Starwood aircraft a 1977 Hawker 700 with an insured value of $1 million after it landed in McAllen, Texas, from a flight from Mexico.

Insurers of both aircraft have since filed complaints in federal court in Nevada seeking to have the Starwood policies nullified, in part, because they say Esquino lied in the application process when he noted he had never been indicted on drug-related criminal charges. Both companies said they would not have issued the policies had he been truthful.

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Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Friday that it began selling Apple Inc's flagship iPhone 5 smartphone at a big discount in thousands of its stores.

Wal-Mart said it is selling the 16 GB Apple iPhone 5 for $127, versus an original price of $189.97. The price is valid with a two-year contract from wireless carriers Verizon , Sprint and AT&T , the retailer added.

Wal-Mart said it is also selling the 16 GB iPhone 4S and the 16 GB iPad with Retina display and WiFi at discounts.

The offers will be available for 30 days in about 3,000 of Wal-Mart 's stores, which were not identified. They are not available online, according to the retailer.

Apple has focused on high-priced, premium gadgets for many years and has strictly enforced its prices with retailers and other distributors. However, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman said on Friday that the discounts were arranged with Apple .

"We worked together with them on this," the spokeswoman, Sarah Spencer, said. "They are a great partner."

Wal-Mart is pricing the iPad starting at $399, down from $499. Beginning December 17 the retailer said it will throw in a $30 iTunes card.

Wal-Mart is selling the 16 GB iPhone 4S for $47, versus an original price of $89.97, it said.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Wal-Mart 's cooperation with Apple is a contrast to its relationship with Amazon.com Inc, the world's largest Internet retailer .

In September, Wal-Mart said it would stop selling Amazon 's Kindle eReaders and tablets, placing a bet that consumers would be more interested in Apple 's gadgets. This spring, Target Corp stopped selling Kindle devices.

(Reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by Dan Grebler)

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WASHINGTON (AP) Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton , who skipped an overseas trip this past week because of a stomach virus , sustained a concussion after fainting, the State Department said Saturday.

The 65-year-old Clinton , who's expected to leave her job soon after serving as America's top diplomat during President Barack Obama 's first term, is recovering at home after the incident last week and is being monitored by doctors, according to a statement by aide Philippe Reines .

No further details were immediately available.

The statement said Clinton was dehydrated because of the virus and that she fainted and sustained a concussion. She will continue to work from home in the week ahead and looks forward to being back in the office "soon," the statement said.

Congressional aides do not expect her to testify as scheduled at congressional hearings on Thursday into the Sept. 11 attack against a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to publicly discuss Clinton's status.

Clinton backed out of a trip to North Africa and the Persian Gulf on Monday because she was sick. She caught the virus during a recent visit to Europe.

She's known for her grueling travel schedule and is the most traveled secretary of state, having visited 112 countries while in the job.

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