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BANGKOK: Thailand’s Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej, who
has a notoriously combative relationship with his country’s press,
threatened on Sunday to sue two local newspapers. Speaking on his
weekly Talking Samak Style television show, the prime minister took
two unnamed papers to task over their reporting of disputes over a
temple on the Thai-Cambodia border. Samak, who is known for his
gruff, straight-talking style, recently canceled his twice-weekly
press briefings because he said he was worried he would publicly
utter “rude words.”
-- AFP
BELGRADE: Voters in Serbia took to the polls on
Sunday in general elections seen as a referendum giving its people a
stark choice between entering or abandoning the European Union over
Kosovo’s independence. Polling stations throughout Serbia opened
at 7 a.m. and would remain open till 8 p.m. Early estimations of the
results are expected two hours later. More than 6.8 million
voters—including more than 115,000 Serbs scattered across Kosovo,
the tense Albanian-majority province which broke away from Serbia in
February—will elect 250 parliamentary deputies, as well as local
councilors.
-- AFP
BAGHDAD: US troops killed a woman, a child and
two suspected armed men during an operation targeting al-Qaida in
Nineveh province, the US military said on Sunday. The military said
that its troops on Saturday opened fire on a civilian car carrying
suspected militants that refused to stop near the provincial capital
city of Mosul, some 400km north of Baghdad. “Coalition forces
fired three warning shots, but the driver refused to stop and one
man made threatening movements from inside the vehicle,” the
military statement said. “Coalition forces responded to the
perceived threat and engaged the vehicle, killing two armed men
inside. A woman and a child in the vehicle were also killed in the
engagement,” it said.
-- Xinhua
ANKARA: The Turkish Army struck targets of the
outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq Saturday
night, Turkish General Staff said in a statement issued on Sunday.
Turkish warplanes and artillery on Saturday night started to hit a
group of PKK rebels in the Avasin-Basyan region of northern Iraq who
retreated there after taking part in an attack on a Turkish military
outpost in the border province of Hakkari Friday night that killed
six soldiers, said the statement, adding that the strike was
“intense and effective.” The targeted positions were destroyed
in the strike and a group of PKK rebels were killed, the statement
said, without giving the specific number of PKK rebels killed in the
raid.
-- Xinhua
WASHINGTON: A series of powerful tornadoes swept
across the US Great Plains Saturday, killing at least 11 people in
Oklahoma and Missouri, CNN television reported. The report said a
twister that touched down late in the afternoon in Ottawa County,
Oklahoma, killed five people and heavily damaged many buildings. In
nearby Picher, Oklahoma, several people remained unaccounted for,
according to the network. Three more people were killed and an
unspecified number of others were injured when a tornado touched
down between the towns of Seneca and Neosho near the Missouri-Kansas
border. Another person was killed when thunderstorms knocked a
tree onto a mobile home east of Carthage, Missouri and one more
weather-related death was reported in Purdy, Missouri.
-- AFP
GAZA CITY: The Gaza Strip faced new power
blackouts on Sunday after its only electricity plant shut down after
receiving no fuel from Israel in four days, senior Palestinian
officials said. “There is a very serious crisis with respect to
electricity,” Jamal al-Dardasawi, spokesman for the Gaza
electrical distribution company, told Agence France-Presse. “With
the power station having shut down we are only receiving 120
megawatts from Israel and we need around 250 megawatts. There is a
shortfall of around 50 percent,” he said. The Gaza plant provides
30 percent of the impoverished and densely populated territory’s
electricity, with most of the rest directly supplied by Israel and a
small amount coming from Egypt.
-- AFP
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