Cambodian building drops; 17 people die
SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia -- A seven-story building under construction in Cambodia's coastal city of Sihanoukville collapsed on workers housed inside early Saturday, killing 17 workers and injuring 24, authorities said.
Provincial authorities said in a statement that four Chinese nationals involved in the construction have been detained while an investigation into the collapse is carried out.
Construction workers said the unfinished building doubled as their housing, with the crew spending nights on the second floor. Nhor Chandeun and his wife were asleep when at around 4 a.m. they heard a loud noise and the building crumbled on top of them.
The Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training said that 30 workers were at the site when the building collapsed, but Nhor Chandeun said there were about 55-60 people inside the building.
Yun Min, the governor of Preah Sihanouk province, said the building was owned by a Chinese investor who leased land for a condominium -- one of many Chinese projects in the thriving beach resort.
It wasn't immediately clear what caused the collapse.
Afghan leaders talk peace in Pakistan
ISLAMABAD -- Dozens of Afghan political leaders attended a peace conference in neighboring Pakistan on Saturday to pave the way for further Afghan-to-Afghan dialogue.
The conference is to be followed by meetings and working sessions over the next two days, all of which come in the run-up to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's visit to Pakistan this week.
Ghani, his political opponents and a broad swath of Afghan civil society have been holding meetings in recent days with the United States' special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who continues to press for talks between the Afghan government, the opposition and the Taliban.
There are no representatives of the Taliban at Saturday's conference, held near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
On Saturday, Khalilzad was in Doha where the Taliban maintain a political office, but it wasn't clear when he would meet again with the militants, who control or wield significant influence in nearly half of the country.
The event was backed by the Pakistani government and organized by two think tanks.
Protesters occupy German coal mine
HOCHNEUKIRCH, Germany -- Hundreds of climate-change activists broke through a police cordon and stormed into one of Germany's biggest lignite coal mines Saturday, two days after European Union leaders disagreed on a plan to make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.
Police ordered protesters to leave the vast, open-pit Garzweiler mine in western Germany, citing life-threatening dangers. German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported that some officers had been hurt, but didn't have any further details.
Earlier Saturday, dozens of protesters succeeded in temporarily blocking railroad tracks used to transport coal. The vast majority of the thousands of demonstrators in and around the western German village of Hochneukirch near the mine and adjacent power plants remained peaceful.
The mine has become a focus of environmental protests in recent years because the operator, German utility company RWE, threatened to chop down a nearby forest to enlarge it.
Participants in the Saturday protests held banners calling for climate protection and sang songs as they marched through villages in the Rhineland region near the mine.
A Section on 06/23/2019