■ Sri Lanka
Troops enforce curfew
The government deployed the military to impose a curfew in a Sri Lankan town yesterday after a police shooting killed two people during a night of ethnic violence. Over 1,000 majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils clashed Wednesday over a road accident between a Sinhalese-owned bus and a Tamil-owned three-wheeler motorcycle taxi, police spokesman Rienzie Perera said. Police were "compelled to open fire to quell mobs who torched shops and houses and attacked our people," Perera said, adding that the shooting left two people dead. He declined to identify the dead men, saying it might fuel tension in the area. The violence broke out in the central Sri Lankan town of Nuwara Eliya, 180km east of the capital, Colombo. Nuwara Eliya is home to tens of thousands of Tamils, whose forebears were brought from neighboring India by the British.
■ China
Bad baby formula rampant
An ongoing investigation into the deaths of babies from consuming substandard milk powder has found the products are widely produced in China, state media said yesterday. Investigators discovered 141 factories in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Shandong, Hebei, Hubei, Jiangxi and Inner Mongolia making the fake powder, Xinhua news agency reported. Even Beijing and Shanghai had factories churning out the deadly formula, it said. The products were sold in 149 brands. According to the government and media, 16 babies have died and 189 suffered from malnutrition after ingesting formula deficient in protein and other essential nutrients. State-controlled media have reported fake milk products or malnourished babies in 13 of China's 30 provinces or regions.
■ Macedonia
Premier wins poll
Liberal Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski won Wednesday's presidential election, but his conservative opponent has claimed fraud and demanded the ballot be annulled. With virtually all the ballots counted, Crvenkovski received 62 percent, the state electoral commission said. He replaces Boris Trajkovski, a highly respected politician who died in a February airplane crash. Right-wing opposition candidate Sasko Kedev had 37 percent. The commission said the turnout of 53 percent was enough to make the election valid. Crvenkovski celebrated his victory, saying the country ``passed a huge democratic test.'' But Kedev called the balloting the worst election fraud in his nation's history.
■ United Nationals
No WMDs for terrorists
The Security Council unanimously approved a resolution Wednesday to keep chemical, biological and nuclear weapons out of terrorists' hands. First proposed in a UN General Assembly speech by US President George W. Bush in September, the resolution extends the reach of non-proliferation treaty powers beyond states to "non-state actors" -- diplomatic-speak that includes terror groups. The 15 to 0 vote followed months of redrafting to gain support from several nations. China ended a threat to use its veto when language was dropped that would have allowed the interdiction of ships at sea suspected of carrying banned weapons.
■ United States
LA bans beach smoking
The city of Los Angeles is to ban smoking on its most popular beaches, joining its neighbor Santa Monica to create a 20km stretch of smoke-free waterfront, officials said Wednesday. The city council approved the measure and Mayor James Hahn is expected to sign the legislation. The ban's proponents say smoking on beaches poses health risks, such as second-hand smoke and poisoning from cigarette butts that leach toxins into sand and water. Environmental groups list cigarette butts as the most common litter on beaches. California has led the US in anti-smoking legislation, with many states and cities following its lead in banning smoking in public spaces, workplaces and restaurants.
■ Norway
Eagle snares bear cub
Zoologists were astonished on Wednesday to learn that a golden eagle recently snatched a bear cub from its mother. Two park rangers in the Lierne region of central Norway saw the eagle swoop down on the cub trotting behind its mother and carry it away, one of the rangers told public broadcaster NRK. A golden eagle normally weighs about 6kg, while the bear cub was said to have weighed about half that. Torgeir Nygaard of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research said the likelihood of an eagle snatching a bear was about as great as the chance of "finding snow in the Sahara."
■ Iran
UFO fever grips Tehran
Flying saucer fever has gripped Iran after dozens of sightings in recent days. Fanciful cartoons of alien spacecraft have adorned newspapers' front pages. State television on Wednesday showed a sparkling white disc it said was filmed over Tehran on Tuesday night. Other UFOs have been spotted emitting green, red, blue and purple rays over the northern cities of Tabriz and Ardebil and in the Caspian Sea province of Golestan, the official IRNA news agency reported.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.