■SRI LANKA
Dynamite explosion kills 25
Authorities yesterday began clearing rubble and wreckage after 25 people were killed in the first major explosion since the end of a decades-long civil war. Heavy earth-moving equipment was being brought to the village of Karadiyanaru, in the east of the island, as families of victims prepared for funerals. A local relief official said the death toll was officially put at 25 based on a body count, but investigators were working to establish if there were people unaccounted for after three containers of explosives stored at a police station blew up on Friday. The explosion left a crater about 10m deep at the site of Karadiyanaru police station, where a huge amount of dynamite had been stored for safe keeping. The military said the cause of the blast did not look to be suspicious. “We completely rule out sabotage. There is no threat to security in that area,” military spokesman Ubaya Medawala said.
■INDIA
Protester killed in Kashmir
Another protester was killed as fresh anti-India protests shook Indian Kashmir yesterday, bringing the number of civilian deaths in a wave of unrest in the Muslim-majority region to 100. One man was killed in Anantag when police fired at demonstrators, who started pelting stones when authorities retrieved the body of a man who drowned on Monday when police allegedly chased him into a river. “Security forces had to open fire to quell the violent demonstration,” a police officer said from Anantnag, south of Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, where a two-decade revolt has been under way against New Delhi’s rule. Authorities also reported another young protester died in hospital yesterday after being injured earlier in the week, when security forces fired on stone-hurling protesters in Srinagar.
■RUSSIA
Presidents race to mark ties
President Dmitry Medvedev and his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yanukovych, on Friday celebrated their nations’ increasingly warm ties by driving vintage cars in a race from Russia to Ukraine. The race commemorated 100 years since a similar car race in Czarist Russia, following the same route, with Czar Nicholas II offering a prize. Russian TV footage showed Medvedev and Yanukovych meeting in the Russian border region of Bryansk, from where they two rode 60km to the ancient town of Glukhov in Ukraine, with each leader driving a separate vintage Pobeda car. “This car race is true symbol of our friendship,” Medvedev said in Ukraine in remarks released by Yanykovych’s office.
■TURKEY
Baby crawled onto highway
Security cameras in Antalya have recorded the sight of a baby crawling onto a highway and startling drivers, who waved frantically to other motorists to get out of the way. The one-year-old toddler survived. The video footage shows a baby crawling out of the arms of his mother, who had fallen asleep while begging on the sidewalk. The baby is seen climbing down the sidewalk and sitting on the side of the highway, less than a meter away from passing vehicles in heavy highway traffic. Anatolia news agency said drivers called the police, who returned the baby to his mother. She was released after a short time in custody.
■POLAND
Chechen dissident freed
Exiled Chechen independence leader Akhmed Zakayev was released from custody late on Friday, after he was arrested earlier in the day on a Russian warrant accusing him of terrorism. “Poland respects democratic values,” Zakayev said in a live broadcast shown by TVN24 television, smiling as he left a Warsaw courthouse before a car collected him. He said that he planned to attend the final day yesterday of a congress of Chechens near Warsaw. In its ruling, the court said it had taken into consideration the fact that in 2003 Zakayev was granted political asylum in Britain, where he is now based.
■UNITED STATES
Russian planes fly by ship
Russian naval aircraft repeatedly buzzed a US warship last week in a Cold War-style incident that the US Navy’s chief of operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, has raised with his Russian counterpart, Admiral Vladimir Vysotskiy. The USS Taylor did not go on an alert over unusually close encounters on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11 in international waters of the Barents Sea, just off Russia. “The ship did not take this as hostile,” Colonel Dave Lapan said. Roughead raised the matter with Vysotskiy during a visit on Wednesday by a top-level Russian defense delegation to the Pentagon. “Admiral Roughead was satisfied after having this conversation with his counterpart,” Lapan said without elaboration.
■RUSSIA
Bailiffs may confiscate dogs
Bailiffs have threatened to take what is most precious from a pensioner who has failed to pay a debt — her three Shar Pei pedigree puppies, they said on Friday. The pensioner, whom the bailiffs did not name, owes 350,000 rubles (US$11,330) to an individual in her home town in the volcanic Kamchatka region in the Far East. “If she does not fulfil her obligations [to pay back the debt] within 10 days, the puppies will be sold by the Federal Agency for State Property Management,” bailiffs said in a statement on their site fssprus.ru.
■PARAGUAY
Prison child porn ring found
Authorities on Friday broke up a child pornography ring that made sexually explicit films inside the national penitentiary with youths who passed as relatives of inmates, prosecutors said. Prosecutor Teresa Martinez said two inmates and a third person who was on parole were implicated in the ring. “In two cellbocks there were sets where explicit sex was filmed. There were machines and connections to download them to the Internet. They had film and digital cameras,” Martinez said. She said there was no way prison officials were not aware of what was going on, adding that they were under investigation. The prison’s director was fired, and the justice ministry took control of the penitentiary’s operations for 30 days. The investigation was launched after two underaged girls and a third who was 19 years old said they were contacted by prison inmates through Facebook and their homes located through Google Earth, the prosecutor said.
■UNITED STATES
Abductee’s dad surrenders
A 20-year-old man who authorities say was abducted by his father 17 years ago during a messy divorce apparently read a newspaper article about his disappearance and persuaded his father to turn himself in. Stephen Michael Palacios will soon be reunited with his mother, Dee Ann Adams, after almost two decades. He and his father, Stephen Palacios Jr, went to an attorney’s office in Houston, Texas, on Thursday where the father surrendered to federal authorities. Palacios Jr was being held on Friday on charges of interference with child custody. Adams, who remarried and has several other children, said on Friday that she was overwhelmed but happy. She declined to say when they planned to reunite.
■CANADA
Teen may face porn charges
The federal police force is considering whether to charge a 16-year-old boy who put photos onto Facebook of a young girl being gang raped at a party. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Derren Lench said on Friday that a 16-year-old girl was drugged and raped by several teenagers and adults at a rave party last weekend in a rural area east of Vancouver, British Columbia. Lench said the boy was arrested for taking photos of the rape and posting them on the popular networking site. The boy has since been released, but Lench said he could be charged with distributing child pornography.
■UNITED STATES
Cartoonist hides from threat
A Seattle cartoonist who stirred up a religious storm with a tongue-in-cheek encouragement to draw images of the prophet Mohammed has gone into hiding after a threat to her safety. Molly Norris, who published an illustration in April on her Web site entitled “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” was told by the FBI to “go ghost,” according to Seattle Weekly, where Morris was a regular contributor. “On the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI,” Norris is “moving, changing her name and essentially wiping away her identity,” a Seattle Weekly report said on Thursday.
■UNITED STATES
BP aims for complete seal
BP was set yesterday to cap a months-long effort to end the worst maritime oil spill in history with a death choke that would permanently seal its ruptured Gulf of Mexico well. The British energy giant began pumping cement into the busted well on Friday, after which “standard plugging and abandonment procedures for the relief well” will go ahead so it can be finally, completely sealed, it said.
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
‘DOWNSIZE’: The Trump administration has initiated sweeping cuts to US government-funded media outlets in a move critics said could undermine the US’ global influence US President Donald Trump’s administration on Saturday began making deep cuts to Voice of America (VOA) and other government-run, pro-democracy programming, with the organization’s director saying all VOA employees have been put on leave. On Friday night, shortly after the US Congress passed its latest funding bill, Trump directed his administration to reduce the functions of several agencies to the minimum required by law. That included the US Agency for Global Media, which houses Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Asia and Radio Marti, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. On Saturday morning, Kari Lake, a former Arizona gubernatorial and US
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
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