The world in brief

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“This attack shows that our people, if they decide to attack any place they can do it.”

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, after fighters from the group attacked a heavily guarded hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan Article, this page

Bomb blasts at 2 cafes kill 16 in Iraq

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber struck a Baghdad cafe overnight as customers watched a soccer game on television, killing at least 12 people and wounding 38, Iraqi officials said Thursday.

The attack in the western Washash neighborhood took place late Wednesday, two police officers said. The bomber mingled with the cafe crowd before setting off his explosive belt.

On Thursday, a bomb exploded inside a cafe in a town just south of Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 12, police said.

Two medical officials confirmed the casualty figures.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to journalists.

Violence has spiked in Iraq since April, when security forces cracked down on a Sunni protest camp north of Baghdad in clashes that killed 45 people.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attacks.

Food given out in drought-stricken Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Aid workers in Haiti are distributing food to help some of the Caribbean nation’s poorest people cope with a severe drought, an official with a United Nations agency said Thursday.

The World Food Program on Wednesday began handing out cereal, vegetable oil and iodized salt to 10,000 people in towns in the northwestern peninsula of Haiti, program chief Antoine Renard said.

Aid workers hope to reach 164,000 people with food by the end of the month, when the rainy season is to begin. The goal is to hand out enough food to last at least a month so farmers won’t be forced to eat their seeds, which would affect their ability to grow crops.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a U.S.-government financed program that tracks weather patterns, agricultural production and food prices in an effort to offset famine, describes worrisome conditions for Haiti’s northwest.

Rains ended earlier than usual in October in the northwest and elsewhere along the northern coast, leading to the loss of sorghum, bean and corn crops.

The scarcity of water and an earlier and longer lean season will put families in a crisis category through June, the network reported. That category means that at least one in five households faces a food shortage, along with high or unusually acute malnutrition.

China pupils rat-poisoned; 2 die, 30 ill

BEIJING - Authorities said two children have died and another 30 were sickened in a mass poisoning at a kindergarten in southwestern China.

Investigators identified the toxic substance as a powerful rat poison but do not yet know how it was administered Wednesday in the kindergarten in Yunnan province’s rural Qiubei county. State broadcaster CCTV says the school began accepting students last year despite not being fully licensed.

Along with the victims, aged 4 and 5, six others remained hospitalized today, three of them in serious condition.

Chinese schools have suffered a series of mass stabbings and other attacks by mentally disturbed people or those bearing grudges. There also have been cases of school staff members administering medication without authorization.

In ’13, Syrians top list of asylum seekers

GENEVA - Syria, Russia and Afghanistan have the largest numbers of people fleeing their homelands to seek asylum, and most are turning to Europe, the United Nations refugee agency said in a report today.

Syria’s 3-year-old civil war generated 56,351 asylum seekers in 2013, more than double the previous year’s 25,232, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Syria became the world’s biggest source for asylum seekers, surpassing Afghanistan, which fell to third.

Russia, meanwhile, became the second-biggest source of asylum seekers with 39,779, up from 22,650 in 2012.

Volker Turk, the agency’s director of international protection, attributed Russia’s surge to rising unrest in the Russian region of Chechnya. He forecast that Syria’s refugee problem would worsen this year.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/21/2014

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