QUOTE OF THE DAY
“He is a man full of problems, who lost his job, who lost everything. He was desperate.”
Rome Prosecutor Pierfilippo Laviani, on an unemployed bricklayer accused of shooting two policemen outside the Italian premier’s office Article, this page
3 dead after French building explodes
REIMS, France - A possible gas explosion ripped off the side of a five-story residential building in France’s Champagne country on Sunday, killing at least three people and injuring 14 others, officials said.
More than 100 rescue workers, firefighters, sniffer-dog squads and bomb and gas experts were deployed to the gutted building in a subsidized housing complex in the city of Reims, east of Paris, officials said. Heaps of debris spilled out of the building onto a grassy esplanade below.
Michel Bernard, the top government official in Reims, said crews searching for survivors turned up the body of a woman under the rubble Sunday afternoon, raising the death toll to three. He said it was unlikely that the toll would rise any higher.
Through most of the day, authorities had said at least two people had died. One person was hospitalized with serious, but not life-threatening injuries, and another 13 people had minor injuries, officials said.
3 die in Taliban-claimed Afghan blast
KABUL - Taliban insurgents marked the start of their spring offensive on Sunday by claiming responsibility for a remote-controlled roadside bomb blast that killed three police officers.
In past years, spring has marked a significant upsurge in fighting between the Taliban and NATO forces along with their local allies.
In Sunday’s attack in Ghazni province in southern Afghanistan, a bomb exploded under police vehicles traveling to the district of Zana Khan to take part in a military operation against insurgents, said Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, the province’s deputy governor.
He said the blast destroyed the vehicle carrying Col.
Mohammad Hussain, the deputy provincial police chief, killing him and two other officers. Ahmadi said two officers also were wounded in the insurgent operation, which he said clearly targeted Hussain.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility in an e-mail sent to news media. He called the bombing the first attack in the Taliban spring offensive.
Iceland’s center-right stages comeback
REYKJAVIK, Iceland - In an about-face, Icelandic voters have returned to power the center-right parties that led the national economy to collapse five years ago.
With all votes counted Sunday, the conservative Independence Party and rural-based Progressive Party - which governed Iceland for decades before the 2008 crash - each had 19 seats in Iceland’s 63-seat parliament, the Althingi.
The parties, who are promising to ease Icelanders’ economic pain with tax cuts and debt relief, took 51 percent of the vote between them and are likely to form a coalition government.
Voters shunned the Social Democrat-led coalition that has spent four years trying to turn the country around with painful austerity measures. The Social Democrats took nine seats and their former coalition partners, the Left-Greens, seven.
The pro-Europe Bright Future party took six seats and online freedom advocates the Pirate Party three.
France shifts troops out of Timbuktu
BAMAKO, Mali - Dozens of French troops have left the northern Malian town of Timbuktu several months after their military operation largely ousted radical Islamic fighters from the area, a French military official said Sunday.
The reallocation of about 100 French soldiers to the northeastern town of Gao will pose a critical test as to whether Malian soldiers and their counterparts from neighboring nations will be able to maintain security in the area still threatened by jihadists.
Soldiers from neighboring Burkina Faso officially took over last week in Timbuktu, and French soldiers are now departing, according to Col. Cyrille Zimmer.
“We are leaving a small detachment of 20 men who are going to operate with the Burkinabe battalion,” he said.
“This detachment is going to stay in Timbuktu while the Burkinabes are there.”
France’s defense minister visited Gao on Friday, where he gave reassurances that France intends to keep 1,000 soldiers in its former colony by the end of the year even as it down scales from its deployment high of about 4,000.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 04/29/2013