UKRAINE
Twelve killed in clashes
Twelve people, including seven civilians, were killed in the past 24 hours in clashes between government forces and pro-Russian rebels in the east, officials said yesterday. The city administration of the rebel-stronghold Donetsk said 23 people were also wounded in shelling across the province. The Kiev military said 23 soldiers were injured in the fighting. The latest clashes have been focused around the government-held town of Debaltseve. The pro-Kiev head of the Donetsk interior ministry forces said government troops were still in control of the town of 25,000 yesterday morning. However, Donetsk separatist co-leader Andrei Purgin told Russia’s Interfax news agency that the Ukrainian forces were “surrounded” and unable to receive new supplies or send their wounded for treatment in regional hospitals.
CHINA
Valls skips ‘ally’ label
Visiting French Prime Minister Manuel Valls yesterday shied away at the last moment from calling China and France faithful “allies.” The description was included in the advance text of a speech to businesspeople distributed to the press. “Yes, France and China are two great nations,” it read. “Two partners pledged to work side by side. Two allies faithful to each other.” However, Valls engaged in some last-minute editing while delivering the address, on the second day of a trip seeking greater Chinese investment and business for his country. “Yes, France and China are two great nations, which like to talk of their history, of their culture... of their stubborn attachment to independence,” he said instead. Beijing sees a steady stream of Western visitors keen to express positive sentiments about their relationships in the hope of securing a slice of the Chinese market. Nonetheless, few have ever gone as far as Valls’ original text, and the phrase raised eyebrows among analysts. “It’s very strong terminology,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a China expert at Hong Kong Baptist University. “As far as I’m aware China is not a member of NATO.”
CAMBODIA
Nude Angkor posers nabbed
Three French tourists have been arrested for taking nude photos of each other inside the famed Angkor temple complex, officials said yesterday. The male tourists were discovered inside the Banteay Kdei temple at the world heritage site on Thursday, said Chau Sun Kerya, spokeswoman for the Apsara Authority, the government agency managing the Angkor complex. “The temple is a worship site and their behavior is inappropriate. They were nude,” she said. The Apsara Authority said in a statement that the three tourists have “admitted they really made a mistake by taking nude pictures.” It said that police were building a case against them.
VENEZUELA
Plane crashes after pursuit
A small civilian aircraft, pursued by Venezuelan military jets, on Thursday crashed into the Caribbean Sea near the island of Aruba, officials on the island said. Aruban Minister of Justice Arthur Dowers said in a telephone interview that he was waiting for confirmation as to whether the jets had fired on the plane. Investigators have found body parts, wreckage and packages of what appeared to be drugs at the crash scene, he said.
UNITED STATES
Putin protester takes stage
A protester carrying a sign criticizing the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin of Russia climbed over the orchestra pit and onto the stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on Thursday night as the diva Anna Netrebko took her curtain call after performing the title role in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta. The protester unfurled the sign, which appeared to be decorated with the Ukrainian flag, just as Netrebko was being showered with bravas and a bouquet of flowers. Met officials said that he had been arrested. Netrebko and the conductor for the performance, Valery Gergiev, have both been vocal supporters of Putin, and have faced protests in the West over anti-gay legislation and Russia’s actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
UNITED STATES
‘Suge’ sought in hit-and-run
Los Angeles police say rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight is a “person of interest” in a hit-and-run in Los Angeles on Thursday that left one man dead and another person in the hospital. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Trina Schrader said Knight was a “person of interest” in the case, but gave no other details. The co-founder of Death Row Records ran over two bystanders as he tried to flee a fight on a film set in the city of Compton in southern Los Angeles, Knight’s attorney James Blatt told Entertainment Weekly. Los Angeles police Lieutenant John Corina of the said authorities were treating the case as a homicide, the Los Angeles Times reported. Celebrity news Web site TMZ reported that witnesses said Knight was involved in a film shoot featuring rappers Ice Cube and Dr Dre.
ITALY
Birds ‘count left-to-right’
Humans are not the only ones to count from left to right. Researchers in Italy found that mental number lines, where numbers rise from the smallest on the left to the largest on the right, come naturally to newborn chicks too. In experiments at the University of Padua, three-day old chicks were trained to find food behind a panel bearing five bright spots. Once they had become familiar with that, they were confronted with two panels bearing different numbers of spots. Footage of the chicks showed that when faced with panels that had only two spots, the birds consistently looked behind the left of the two panels. However, when faced with eight spots on each panel, they went poking around the righthand panel. The researchers repeated the experiment with a different set of numbers and found that the chicks again went right for higher numbers and left for lower ones.
EL SALVADOR
Gang raids net 117
Police on Thursday arrested 117 people as they staged raids targeting gang members across the country, officials said. Weapons and ammunition were seized in the operations, which were conducted in the departments of San Vicente, La Paz, Cabanas and elsewhere. Although rival gangs have supposedly observed a truce since 2012, the homicide rate stands at 13 people per day.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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