QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Iraq is bleeding from random violence, which sadly reached record heights during the holy month of Ramadan.” Gyorgy Busztin, acting United Nations envoy to Iraq, after explosions Monday killed at least 58 people and put the country’s death toll for July at 680 Article, this page
Syrian rebels lose ground in Homs
DAMASCUS, Syria - Syria’s opposition forces suffered another blow Monday when government troops captured a key district in the embattled city of Homs that has been a rebel stronghold since the beginning of the country’s uprising.
The capture of Khaldiyeh is a setback for the rebels in the strategic central heartland, bringing President Bashar Assad’s regime closer to its goal of capturing all of Homs, Syria’s third largest city - including neighborhoods in its Old City that the rebels have held for more than a year.
The opposition acknowledged the loss of Khaldiyeh, though some activists said there were still scattered clashes in northern sectors of the district where rebels were still putting up a fight.
In the northern city of Aleppo, several rebel factions including the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, or Nusra Front, attacked army posts in two neighborhoods in an offensive titled “amputating infidels,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
It said rebels captured the neighborhood of Dahret Abed Rabbo and several buildings in Lairamoun there, and that eight government soldiers were killed.
2 blasts leave 14 dead in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan - A late-Sunday bombing and an early-Monday one in southern Afghanistan killed at least 14 people, officials said.
The deputy governor of Zabul province, Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar, said a bombing late Sunday in the province’s Shahjoy district killed 11 people and wounded 12. Three of the dead were local police officers, and the rest were women and children, he said, without providing a breakdown for the civilian casualties.
The target of the attack was a local police chief who was among the victims, Rasoulyar said.
The Monday-morning bombing took place in Kandahar province’s Spin Boldak district and killed three, a mother and her two children.
The attacks came as the Afghan government announced the country’s security forces are prepared for the presidential election next April, although five districts remain gripped by insurgency.
In the east and in the north, government offensives trying to stem insurgent attacks seeking to take advantage of the continuing withdrawal of NATO troops, to be completed by the end of 2014, have left up to 96 insurgents dead, the Afghan ministries of defense and interior said Monday.
Heist nets gems put at $136 million
PARIS - Jewels stolen from a hotel in the southern French city of Cannes over the weekend were worth an estimated $136 million, making the heist the biggest in French history, prosecutors said Monday.
An armed man, who had concealed his face with cloth, snatched the jewels from an exhibition at the ritzy Carlton Hotel on Sunday morning.
Media reports had estimated the value of the jewels at about $53 million, but the prosecutor’s office in the nearby town of Grasse declared the losses to be more than twice that amount.
The scale of the heist is on a par with the 2003 hit on the Antwerp Diamond Centre in Belgium, where robbers took jewels then worth more than $100 million. That jewel heist had been considered the world’s biggest until now.
The heist is the third in Cannes-area hotels this year to draw international attention.
Spanish mourn crash’s 79 victims
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain - Spanish royals, including Crown Prince Felipe, and political leaders joined hundreds in Santiago de Compostela’s storied cathedral Monday evening to mourn the 79 people killed in last week’s train crash, as investigators prepared to examine the train’s “black box” data recorders for more clues into the country’s worst rail disaster in decades.
Driver Francisco Jose Garzon Amo faces multiple counts of negligent homicide for the disaster. The investigation increasingly has focused on him and his failure to brake as the train hurtled into a high-risk curve.
The black box could clear up whether there was a mechanical or technical failure. Experts will start examining it today under the instruction of Judge Luis Alaez, a court spokesman said on condition of anonymity in keeping with court policy.
Several Spanish newspapers, including leading daily El Pais, reported Monday that the driver acknowledged to the judge that the train was traveling too fast and that he briefly stopped paying attention. The court spokesman said she could not comment on details of the testimony.
Officials said 70 people injured in the train accident remained hospitalized, 22 of them in critical condition.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 07/30/2013