CAMBODIA MOURNS BELOVED EX-KING SIHANOUK
PHNOM PENH: Tearful Cambodians wore black ribbons and flags flew at half-mast on Tuesday as the nation mourned the death of revered ex-king Norodom Sihanouk and prepared for the return of his body from China.

Sihanouk, who steered his country through decades of painful political and social upheavals, from independence to war, the Khmer Rouge terror and finally peace, died after suffering a heart attack in Beijing on Monday. He was 89. His body is set to be brought back to his homeland on Wednesday where it will lie in state at the royal palace in Phnom Penh for three months ahead of a lavish funeral, according to government officials.

SYRIA WARPLANES BOMB NORTHERN REBEL BELTS
BEIRUT: Syrian regime warplanes unleashed relentless pre-dawn air raids on Tuesday on rebel positions around Maaret al-Numan, a strategic northern town captured by insurgents last week, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The raids were the “most violent” since the rebels took full control of the town in the province of Idlib on Wednesday, the watchdog said. The warplanes dropped bombs in a bid to break a rebel blockade of the highway, which is preventing army reinforcements from reaching Aleppo, theater of intense fighting between rebels and the army for the past three months. Maaret al-Numan is strategically located in the northwest on the highway linking Damascus to the embattled city of Aleppo. Large swathes of Idlib and Aleppo as well as the countryside abutting the Turkish border have fallen into rebel hands in recent months, setting regime forces on the back foot in the country’s north.

STUDENT PROTEST IN MEXICO TURNS VIOLENT, 176 ARRESTED
MORELIA: Mexican students protesting a new curriculum threw homemade explosives, fired rockets and hurled stones at police in a melee that left 176 arrested and 10 police officers injured, officials said. The protesting students are preparing to become teachers in rural areas, and they are angry because the new curriculum includes English and computer science, which they see as low-priority subjects in poor rural areas of Mexico. Police used tear gas and rubber bullets against the students in this city in western Michoacan state. Students protested after talks with state authorities on the disputed curriculum collapsed. They also fought police with sticks and firecrackers. The students have been holding more than 40 city buses in their possession since October 4, and during the protest they set fire to 13 of them.

‘I SHOULD BE REWARDED,’ KARADZIC TELLS WAR CRIMES COURT
THE HAGUE: A strident Radovan Karadzic told the United Nations Yugoslav war crimes court on Tuesday that nobody thought there would be genocide in Bosnia and that he should be rewarded for doing all to avoid war. Brought to court after his arrest on a Belgrade bus in 2008, Karadzic is charged with masterminding the murder of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys by forces loyal to him in the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995. AFP