Building explosion in Pakistan fatal to 8
LAHORE, Pakistan — Explosives in a building under construction ignited Thursday, ripping through a market in an upscale neighborhood in the eastern city of Lahore, killing eight people, officials said. It was not immediately clear whether the explosives were meant to be a bomb or merely stored in the building.
Thursday’s blast shattered windows of nearby buildings and damaged vehicles parked outside a market in the Defense Housing Authority, said Rana Sanaullah, provincial law minister.
Nearly 30 people were wounded in the blast that the provincial Counter-Terrorism Department said was caused when explosives inside the building went off.
Mohammad Iqbal, spokesman for the department, told reporters that investigators were trying to determine the purpose of storing explosive material in the building, and whether it was an improvised explosive device or remotely controlled device.
Lahore police operations chief Haider Ashraf said the explosion took place inside a building that was under construction and where laborers were working at the time.
Malaysians: VX agent N. Korean’s killer
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The banned chemical weapon VX nerve agent was used in the killing of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean ruler’s outcast half brother who was poisoned last week at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, police said today.
The substance was detected on Kim’s eyes and face, Malaysia’s inspector general of police, Khalid Abu Bakar, said in a statement, citing a preliminary analysis from the country’s Chemistry Department. He said authorities will decontaminate the airport, telling a reporter in a text message today, “We are doing it now.”
According to Malaysian investigators, two women — one of them Indonesian, the other Vietnamese — coated their hands with chemicals and wiped them on Kim’s face Feb. 13.
Khalid told reporters that one of the two women accused of wiping the toxin on Kim’s face was later sickened and threw up.
Kim sought help from airport workers but fell into convulsions and died on the way to the hospital within two hours of the attack, police said.
Arctic seed vault adds 50,000 samples
HELSINKI — Nearly 10 years after a “doomsday” seed vault opened on an Arctic island, about 50,000 new samples from seed collections around the world have been deposited in the world’s largest repository built to safeguard against wars or natural disasters that would wipe out global food crops.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a gene bank built underground on the isolated island in a permafrost zone more than 600 miles from the North Pole, was opened in 2008 as a master backup to the world’s other seed banks, in case their deposits are lost.
The latest specimens sent to the bank, on the Svalbard archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, included more than 15,000 reconstituted samples from an international research center that focuses on improving agriculture in dry zones. The center was the first to retrieve seeds from the vault in 2015 before returning new ones after multiplying and reconstituting them.
The specimens consisted of seed samples for some of the world’s most vital food sources such as potatoes, sorghum, rice, barley, chickpeas, lentils and wheat.
Philippine senator held, vows innocence
MANILA, Philippines — A Philippine opposition senator and leading critic of President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly anti-drug crackdown was arrested this morning on drug charges but professed her innocence and vowed she would not be intimidated by a leader she called a “serial killer.”
Sen. Leila de Lima’s arrest came a day after the Regional Trial Court in Muntinlupa city in the Manila area issued the warrant for her arrest along with other officials who face charges by state prosecutors of receiving bribes from detained drug lords.
De Lima has denied the charges, which she said were part of an attempt by Duterte to muzzle critics of his crackdown, which has left more than 7,000 drug suspects dead. She questioned why the court suddenly issued the arrest order when it was scheduled today to hear her petition to void the three nonbailable charges.
“If they think they can silence me, if they think I will no longer fight for my advocacies, especially on the truth on the daily killings and other intimidations of this Duterte regime, it’s my honor to be jailed for what I’ve been fighting for,” she said before policemen took her into custody at the Senate.