Clashes erupted between residents and government forces in Indian-administered Kashmir’s main city yesterday, a day after a teenage boy was killed, allegedly by a rubber bullet fired by police.
Shops, businesses and schools were closed and public buses stayed off the roads in Srinagar to protest the boy’s death.
The 17-year-old student, Tufail Ahmed Mattoo, died late on Friday after being hit in the head by a rubber bullet fired by police during a protest against Indian rule, resident Shakeel Ahmed said.
He said Mattoo was not part of the protest and was carrying his school bag when he was shot.
Police called the death “mysterious” and said they were investigating it.
“We’re waiting for the medical report, but apparently it seems he was hit by a heavy object,” said Hemant Lohia, a top police officer.
Thousands of people defied restrictions imposed by authorities in several neighborhoods in Srinagar and gathered yesterday at Mattoo’s home to pay their respects. The mourners carried his body for burial while shouting “We want freedom” and “Blood for blood.”
Police and paramilitary soldiers fired tear gas to quell the protests in several places in Srinagar, a police officer said on condition of anonymity in keeping with department policy. He said angry protesters pulled down at least two paramilitary bunkers in the city.
Anti-India sentiment runs deep in the Muslim-majority region, where rebel groups have been fighting for Kashmir’s independence from India or its merger with neighboring Pakistan since 1989.
The region is divided between India and Pakistan and is claimed by both.
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,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the