The world in brief

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The carriers are responsible for supplying America’s air power. So it’s natural that we want to sink the carriers.”

Adm. Ali Fadavi, the naval chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who said Iran will target American aircraft carriers if a war between the two countries ever breaks out

Article, 2A

Stabber wounds 6 at China train station

BEIJING — Chinese police shot and wounded a man who attacked passengers at a busy railway station in southern China on Tuesday, leaving six people injured in the third high-profile assault on civilians at a train station in a little more than two months.

There was no immediate word on a motive for the violence in the Guangdong provincial capital of Guangzhou.

Security has been heightened countrywide in the wake of two deadly attacks at train stations blamed on extremists among the Turkic Uighur Muslim population from far-western China. The country also has seen mass stabbings carried out by people with grudges against society or who were deemed mentally ill.

The latest attack happened late in the morning at the Guangzhou Railway Station, city police said. Officers shot and subdued a male suspect with a knife after he failed to respond to a police warning, the statement said.

Police said the person was receiving treatment in a hospital, but gave no further details. Six people were injured and taken to a hospital, not including the suspect, they said.

Industrial fire in north-Iran city injures 1

TEHRAN, Iran — A large fire broke out Tuesday in an industrial city in northern Iran, and one person was injured, officials said. The semiofficial Fars news agency initially said an explosion had gone off in a wood- and oil-storage facility, injuring nearly 50 people. But the mayor of Qazvin, Masoud Nosrati, told the official IRNA news agency that reports of an explosion were “incorrect.” He also said firefighters had contained the blaze. The head of the emergency department, Habibollah Behtooei, rejected earlier reports about a large number of casualties, saying nobody was in the facility when the fire began and only one rescue worker was injured.

Toronto mayor said not to enter U.S.

TORONTO — The mystery of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s whereabouts deepened Tuesday, after reports that he did not enter the United States as expected but instead returned to Canada after landing at a Chicago airport.

Ford’s lawyer said last week that the mayor had left Toronto for rehabilitation after a video surfaced that appeared to show him smoking a crack pipe late last month — nearly a year after reports of an initial video that appeared show him smoking the drug. The lawyer, Dennis Morris, said Ford’s plane was headed for Chicago.

But Roy Norton, the Consul General of Canada in Chicago, told The Globe and Mail that Ford voluntarily withdrew his application to enter the U.S. when he landed and was “not denied entry, per se.”

Kris Grogan, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said anyone hoping to enter the U.S. must “overcome ALL grounds of inadmissibility.” He said there are more than 60 grounds for inadmissibility, including criminality, security reasons and documentation requirements.

Once a foreign visitor is formally denied entry, he has to receive special permission from the government to try to come back. If Ford decided on his own not to ask immigration authorities to let him in, future visits could be as simple as presenting his passport at the border.

Vatican: 848 of 3,420 abusers defrocked

GENEVA — The Vatican released comprehensive statistics for the first time Tuesday on how it has disciplined priests accused of raping and molesting children, saying 848 priests have been defrocked and another 2,572 were given lesser sanctions over the past decade.

The Vatican’s United Nations ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, revealed the figures during a second day of grilling by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty against torture.

Tomasi insisted the convention applied only inside the tiny Vatican City state, but he released statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex-abuse cases globally.

Tomasi said that since 2004, more than 3,400 credible cases of abuse had been referred to the Vatican, including 401 cases in 2013. He said that over the past decade, 848 priests had been defrocked, or returned to the lay state by the pope. Another 2,572 were sentenced to a lifetime of penance and prayer or some other lesser sanction, which is often used when the accused priest is elderly or infirm.

A Section on 05/07/2014