QUOTE OF THE DAY
“This resolution tells the authors of the crimes, whoever they are, wherever they are:
‘You will be held to account, and you will not remain unpunished.’”
Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, after the Human Rights Council voted for a resolution that condemned the use of chemical weapons by Syrian authorities Article, 1A
Bomb blast on bus kills 19 in Pakistan
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A bomb exploded in the back of a bus carrying government employees in northern Pakistan on Friday, killing 19 people and wounding dozens, officials said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but militants battling the government in northwestern Pakistan often target troops, officials and symbols of the state.
Friday’s attack took place as the bus was traveling through the outskirts of the city of Peshawar, the provincial capital. It was carrying employees at the end of the workweek back to their home city of Charsadda.
The explosion also wounded 46 people, police officer Arif Khan said.
Last year, at least 18 people were killed in the same neighborhood in a similar attack on a bus carrying government employees to Charsadda.
A schoolteacher, Haroon Khan, was critically wounded during that attack but recovered - only to die during Friday’s blast, the officer said.
21 die as boat sinks off Indonesia coast
JAKARTA, Indonesia - A boat carrying dozens of asylum seekers sank off the coast of Indonesia’s main island of Java on Friday, killing at least 21 people, an official said.
Twenty-five people were rescued and transported to the Sukabumi immigration office for identification, said Cianjur Police Chief Lt. Col. Dedy Kusuma Bakti. The search for survivors was continuing.
Some survivors told officials that more than 100 asylum seekers from Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq were believed to be aboard the boat, but the exact number of passengers was not known, Bakti said. Survivors said the boat was headed for Australia’s Christmas Island.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency said 17 Lebanese drowned in the sinking. Nine members of a single family were among the Lebanese victims, a woman and her eight children dying and her husband surviving, the agency reported.
2 plead innocent in British soldier’s death
LONDON - Two men accused of the first terrorist killing on British soil in years pleaded innocent Friday to murdering a young soldier who was brutally hacked to death outside his barracks in May.
The attack on Fusilier Lee Rigby, 25, stunned Britons for its savagery and for the Islamist political rant delivered by one of the suspects, Michael Adebolajo, who held a large knife dripping with blood as an onlooker filmed his diatribe.
Adebolajo, 28, declared that the slaying was retribution for the killings of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of the British military. Minutes later, Adebolajo and his purported accomplice, Michael Adebowale, 22, were shot and arrested by police.
Both suspects are British citizens of Nigerian descent.
The pair appeared in a London court by video link Friday from the prison where they are being held. They pleaded innocent to charges of murder, conspiracy to murder and the attempted murder of a police officer who responded to the May 22 assault. A trial has been set for November.
Rigby’s death was the first killing in Britain apparently motivated by radical Islam since 2005, when 52 people died in coordinated suicide bombings on the London transport system.
Philippines standoff ends; hostages safe
MANILA, Philippines - A deadly three-week standoff between government troops and Muslim rebels who held nearly 200 people hostage in the southern Philippines has ended with all of the captives safe, the country’s defense chief said today.
Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said only a handful of Moro National Liberation Front rebels remained in hiding and were being hunted by troops in the coastal outskirts of the city of Zamboanga, adding that authorities were trying to determine whether rebel commander Habier Malik, who led the Sept. 9 attack, was dead.
More than 200 people were killed in the clashes, including 166 rebels, in one of the bloodiest and longest-running attacks by a Muslim group in the south, scene of decades-long Muslim rebellion for self-rule in the largely Roman Catholic country.
Gazmin said 195 hostages were rescued, escaped or were freed.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 09/28/2013