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After the wreath-laying ceremony, Putin visited the Jose Marti museum and left a note in the Book of Honorary Guests.

Russian President Vladimir Putin who is paying a working visit to Cuba laid a wreath to the monument to Cuba’s national hero Jose Marti on Havana’s Revolution Square on Friday. This is a traditional protocol event for the leaders of foreign countries who visit Cuba.

The memorial is located on Revolution Square, which is the venue for major national events of the Cuban people. It is surrounded by the buildings of the Ministries of Revolutionary Armed Forces; Communications and Internal Affairs; the Jose Marti National Library and the National Theatre.

The Palace of the Revolution is the central building on the square. It is the seat of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party; the State Council (parliament) and the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cuba.

After the wreath-laying ceremony, Putin visited the Jose Marti museum and left a note in the Book of Honorary Guests.

After that, the Russian head of state headed for negotiations with Raul Castro, chairman of the Cuban State Council and the Council of Ministers.

The Sea Launch multinational company was founded in 1995 with the participation of the American Boeing Company, Russia's space rocket corporation Energia, the Norwegian Kvaerner Company, and Ukraine's enterprises such as Yuzhnoye (southern) and Yuzhmash (southern engineering) design bureaus.

This is the first-ever commercial international project for the development and operation of a sea-launch space rocket complex.

The Company and a floating space-launch platform were brought into being with a view to implementing the idea of launching space rockets from the equator.

Thirty-five launches of Zenit-3SL rockets were carried out under the Sea Launch program with 32 of them being successful.

The satellite will make it possible to diversify services being rendered to internet providers, government agencies and transmitting stations.

Odysseus Sea Launch platform (archive)

Overnight to May 27, the Sea Launch Company will loft into space a Zenit-3SL space rocket from the floating platform Odysseus in the Pacific to deploy Eutelsat 3B communications satellite.

Initially, the launch was planned for April 16. However, due to technical reasons the launch had to be postponed.

During a "dry" conveyance to the launch position, technical notes concerning the erection of the rocket were recorded.

The Zenit-3SL rocket consists of the Zenit-2S booster stages made by the Ukraine-based design bureau Yuzhmash (Dnipropetrovsk), and the DM-SL booster made by Russia's space rocket corporation Energia.

The Eutelsat spacecraft is based on the Eurostar E3000 platform. It is made by the Airbus Defense and Space Company and is designed for operation in the commercial C, Ku, and Ka ranges. The satellite will make it possible to diversify services being rendered to internet providers, government agencies, and transmitting stations which operate in Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The designed life of the Eutelsat-3B is more than 15 years.

The unique project allows maintaining the intellectual potential that ensured the creation of the Energia rocket, which has the best technical characteristics in the world.


The Russian government has ordered to prepare proposals for the further development of the unique floating cosmodrome Sea Launch, Energia Space Corporation President Vitaly Lopota told ITAR-TASS on Friday.

"There are instructions from (Prime Minister Dmitry) Medvedev and (Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry) Rogozin to continue the Sea Launch (project) and prepare proposals for its prospects," he said.

The unique project allows maintaining the intellectual potential that ensured the creation of the Energia rocket, which has the best technical characteristics in the world, he noted.

"We maintain the technologies thanks to the Sea Launch project. Development of future super heavy rockets also largely depends on whether we will be able to maintain it," Lopota stressed.

The Sea Lunch international company was founded in 1995 with the participation of the American company Boeing, Russia's Energia, Norway's Kvaerner and Ukrainian’s design office Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash.

It is the major commercial international project to develop and use a sea-based rocket launch complex. The company and the floating cosmodrome are set up with the aim to fulfil the idea to launch rockets from the equator. As a result of the reorganization of the company in 2010, Energia Oversees Limited (the Energia corporation's subsidiary) received 95% of shares, three percent went to Boeing and two percent to the Norwegian shipbuilding company Eicher Solutions. Energia supplies DM boosters used as rocket stages to carry a payload. The corporation is also the head organization in the rocket sector and a technical controller of missions.

Once their espionage cases are resolved, some former North Korean spies find that life in the South can be pretty good. They write books, land TV gigs, work for think tanks and in general benefit from their new home's fascination with their old homeland.

In this April 11, 2014 photo, Won Jeong-hwa wipes a tear during an interview at her apartment in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea.

Won Jeong-hwa is not one of those spies.

A year after finishing a five-year espionage sentence for using sex to obtain military secrets and plotting to assassinate intelligence officers, Won is a 40-year-old single mother eking out a living on an $800 monthly government subsidy.

Her espionage work is not taken seriously enough in South Korea for her to cash in on her past, yet she's also too notorious to find an ordinary job. She says she has been fired from several waitressing and cleaning jobs after employers learned about her past, which she had attempted to conceal.

"I've thought about killing myself many times," Won said in a recent interview at her small apartment in Gunpo, just south of Seoul.

She has two big strikes against her. There are allegations that she was merely a low-level informant whose deeds were inflated by South Korean officials eager to make Pyongyang look bad, and by reporters digging for a sexy story. Additionally, the sexual nature of her crimes carries a stigma in this conservative country.

Won was imprisoned in 2008 after a court ruled that she posed as an ordinary North Korean defector, then used sex to extract secrets from South Korean military officers. The media began calling her "North Korea's Mata Hari" in reference to an exotic dancer from the Netherlands who used sex to obtain military secrets during World War I.

North Korea accused South Korea of cooking up a spy scandal to tarnish Pyongyang's image and said Won was a criminal.

After Won was released, she was a popular guest on TV talk shows where she spoke about her harsh, elite spy training. She said she disobeyed Pyongyang's orders to assassinate two South Korean army intelligence officers with poison.

She also talked about how she fell in love with a junior army officer — the "man of my life." He was later imprisoned for passing her secrets including a list of North Korean defectors even after learning she was a spy.

The attention caused South Korean media to revisit her case. Some reporters questioned the value of her espionage work, and raised suspicions based on testimony by North Korean defectors who said they knew Won and her family members in the North.

Won's 2008 court verdict said she was trained at a special operations unit in Pyongyang and was a daughter of an agent killed on a spy mission in South Korea in 1974. But Won's stepfather, Kim Dong-soon, who came to South Korea in 2007, said in an interview that Won's biological father was an ordinary laborer who died of a heart attack, and that Won was a high school dropout who had nothing to do with special operations forces. Won denies Kim's allegations.

In the verdict and in interviews, it was said that North Korea first sent Won to South Korea in 2001 to take photos of the exteriors of U.S. military installations and to collect South Korean newspaper editorials about North Korea. People dubious of Won's elite status consider that low-level spy work.

Some defectors who met Won before her 2008 arrest say she was often incoherent and unprofessional and could not have been a highly trained spy.

"I believe that she was exploited as an informant. ... She wasn't even worth being called a spy," said Kim Yong-hwa, a defector-turned-activist. He said he once rejected Won's request to meet with a high-profile North Korean defector because she rambled too much.

A key debunker of Won's espionage record is Won herself. She has said in media interviews that she was pressured by prosecutors to provide false testimony, particularly about her use of sex in spy work.

The trial verdict and an investigation by prosecutors said she slept with numerous men, including South Korean officers and her boss at an agency where she worked. Won said she used sex as a spying tool only once, to steal personnel management-related documents from an army major's home computer.

She said she couldn't resist pressure by prosecutors who gave her alcohol and urged her to confess during questioning. They "manufactured (the story of) my relations with men," she said. "I'm not a Mata Hari."

Prosecutors have dismissed Won's claims.

South Korea has a history of forgiving former spies and assassins, though they are still sometimes ostracized. Their careers in the media often depend on whether they were involved in high-profile cases that captured global attention, and whether they followed Seoul's propaganda line against the North.

Won said a prosecutor told her during her questioning that she could make a new start in the South by following in the footsteps of Kim Hyon-hui, a North Korean agent sentenced to death for bombing a South Korean jet in 1987, killing all 115 passengers aboard. Kim was later pardoned and wrote a best-selling autobiography. She often appears on TV to speak critically of North Korea.

Several other North Koreans who once attacked the South now embrace it. One of the 31 North Korean commandos who launched a brazen mission to assassinate South Korea's president in 1968 is now a Christian pastor who lectures about the North. A North Korean crew member of a submarine that ran aground in the South, and who was captured alive after a massive manhunt that left 25 other comrades dead or missing, is a lecturer for the South Korean navy. A spy arrested after a deadly shootout in 1995 works for a think tank run by the South's spy agency and wrote a book about his mission.

Won, on the other hand, feels trapped. No South Korean TV station wants her as an expert because of reports that she may not have been an elite spy. Finding work unrelated to her past is also impossible, she said, because no one wants to hire an unskilled woman with a criminal espionage record.

One of the jobs she gained and quickly lost was at a noodle restaurant. She said a former colleague later told her the boss had been worried she would poison the food.

The army officer Won fell in love with has been released, but they are no longer in touch. Nor is the father of her 12-year-old daughter in the picture: She said he is a South Korean businessman she met in China, where she had been assigned to find and repatriate North Korean defectors before she was sent to South Korea.

Won said the government assistance she gets was not enough for her to even buy a school uniform for her daughter. A center that helps female ex-inmates gave one to her.

Many defectors shun her. She said her neighbors once asked that she move, and that her daughter's friends have been told by their parents to stay away from the girl.

"I've told my daughter she should go to an orphanage because she'd be happier living there," Won said, sobbing. "I want to move to a country where no one knows me."

Police are investigating another body part found in a Long Island town.

The discovery Thursday comes a day after authorities found a severed arm in the yard of a Hempstead home.

Homicide detectives in Nassau and Suffolk counties are investigating.

They're trying to determine if the body parts are connected to a partially dismembered body found Tuesday in a municipal parking lot in Bay Shore, about 25 miles east of Hempstead.

Those remains were found by two people who were walking to the Fire Island ferry terminal about a half-mile away.

Tuesday's discovery led Suffolk County police to search the nearby Gilgo Beach area where 10 sets of human remains were found in 2011.

Police say there are no known links between the Bay Shore body and Gilgo, but they're investigating as a precaution.

Twice last year, Alix Tichelman found herself alone with a man suffering from a drug overdose. The first time she called 911. The second time, police say, she just walked away.

Alix Tichelman, left, of Folsom, Calif., confers with public defender Diane August during her arraignment in Santa Cruz Superior Court in Santa Cruz, Calif., July 9, 2014.

Tichelman, 26, faces manslaughter charges in California after police say the alleged high-priced prostitute calmly collected her things and left as Google executive Forrest Hayes lay dying on his yacht in November following a heroin overdose. About two months earlier in Georgia, she made a panicked call to 911 as her boyfriend Dean Riopelle, owner of a popular Atlanta music venue, suffered an overdose in their home.

Tichelman was never charged in Riopelle's death, but police said Thursday they're going to re-examine that case.

"Both subjects in these cases died of heroin overdoses so there's just several factors we want to look at to make sure that we didn't miss anything," Milton police Capt. Shawn McCarty said.

Police in California say Tichelman had many clients in the wealthy Silicon Valley, but it wasn't clear how long she may have been involved in prostitution. Police there also said that, after Hayes' death, she had done online searches for how to defend herself legally after administering a lethal dose of heroin.

No one answered the door Thursday at the two-story home in the upscale Folsom, California, neighborhood listed as the address for Tichelman's father. The front door was damaged, with a broken door handle and scuff marks on the wood.

A message taped to the door and dated July 8 read, "Please no visitors or media or other contact with the residents, respect our privacy and our property."

Neighbor Brad Parks, who lives three doors down, said the family moved in a year or two ago. He said he didn't know much about the parents and had seen Alix Tichelman just two or three times, most recently about two weeks ago.

Numerous social media postings, photos and other articles online suggest Tichelman was pursuing a career as a fetish model and a life with Riopelle — one photo posted on her Facebook page shows her displaying a diamond "promise ring" given to her by Riopelle.

Riopelle and Tichelman had been dating for about two and a half years and lived together, said Riopelle's sister, Dee Riopelle.

In a 2012 interview with a fetish magazine, fIXE, under the pseudonym AK Kennedy, Tichelman describes herself as a model, writer and makeup artist.

She also said she was interested in bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism, or BDSM. She said she and Riopelle would go to clubs, with her wearing a collar and leash.

Photos that accompany her interview show her in sexually suggestive poses wearing a variety of skimpy outfits, including a studded leather jacket with thigh-high fishnet stockings.

Riopelle was the lead singer of a rock 'n' roll band called the Impotent Sea Snakes, known for its wild stage shows and sexually explicit lyrics. Online videos show the band performing at a massive music festival in Germany, with members dressed in drag. Riopelle, under the stage name "13," is wearing a long, pink wig, a leopard-print jacket, platform boots and tight pants.

Back in Georgia, Riopelle also was known for owning the Masquerade, an Atlanta music venue that is a popular destination for rock, punk and metal acts. Housed in a former mill, the venue is composed of three levels: "heaven" upstairs; "purgatory" on the main floor; and "hell" downstairs.

He was also known for his love of monkeys, as evidenced by his well-kept property in Milton. Just to the right of Riopelle's home stand large animal enclosures, which include a barrel strung up by rope and fencing extending to the top.

Riopelle went to the University of Florida and got a degree in construction engineering. But when he was told by a boss to cut his hair and wear a bigger tie, he decided engineering wasn't for him, his sister said. He opened his first bar, also called the Masquerade, in the historic Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa, Florida, his sister said. About 25 years ago, he moved to Atlanta and opened the Masquerade there.

Over the years, he also opened several sports bars and a fetish bar, his sister said.

"He was very, very wise when it came to business sense," Dee Riopelle said. "Everything Dean touched turned to gold."

In September, however, he and Tichelman's lives took a dark turn. On Sept. 6, a drunken Tichelman called police, saying Riopelle threw her to the ground, according to a police report. Riopelle told officers that she had taken pills and drank alcohol, and had been stage diving and exposing her breasts that night at the Masquerade. He said he took her home because he did not approve.

Riopelle also told officers that she bit him on the finger and threatened to hit herself and tell police Riopelle had beaten her. A neighbor confirmed hearing Tichelman say that. She was charged with battery and arrested; Riopelle was not.

Less than two weeks later, a panicked Tichelman called 911, saying her boyfriend had overdosed on something and wouldn't respond. She told a dispatcher that his eyes were open but that he was unconscious, describing his breathing as "on and off." In the 911 tapes released Thursday, she can be heard saying, "Hello, Dean? Dean, are you awake?"

Tichelman tried for five minutes to revive him before calling 911, according to a police report. She said she had been in the shower when she heard a crash and came out to find Riopelle unconscious. Tichelman said she did not know how much drugs Riopelle had taken, but that he had been on a "bender the last few days," according to the police report.

Riopelle died at a hospital a week later. An autopsy report listed his death as an accidental overdose of heroin, oxycodone and alcohol. Tichelman had told the dispatcher that he had been taking painkillers and drinking.

Police say surveillance video from the Google executive's yacht shows Tichelman's next deadly encounter with heroin in California, on Nov. 23.

Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark gives the following account from the video:

Tichelman prepares the heroin to a liquid and injects it into Hayes' arm. Shortly after, Hayes clutches his chest, near his heart. Tichelman tries to prop him up, but he then loses consciousness.

Tichelman then starts picking up her belongings, including the needle, and cleans up a counter while stepping over Hayes several times. During that time, Tichelman calmly drinks a glass of wine and surveys the scene.

Tichelman then goes outside the cabin of the boat on the dock, looks back inside, then pulls down a window blind, closes a door and leaves.

"Never does she call 911 or call out to others in nearby boats for help. She never tries to administer any aid to him," Clark said. "She is more concerned about getting herself out and concealing evidence than helping Mr. Hayes."

Clark said that investigators learned that Tichelman later did online searches "on how to defend herself after giving a lethal dose of heroin."

Investigators also learned Tichelman planned to leave California late last month, possibly for Georgia, and maybe even leave the country, Clark said.