YEMEN
Soldier opens fire on Saudis
A soldier for exiled government opened fire on Saudi Arabian troops as they exercised in eastern Yemen, killing two of them and wounding another in a rare insider attack during the kingdom’s nearly decadelong war there, officials said on Saturday. The assault in eastern Hadramawt Province comes as a yearslong cease-fire between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels largely has held despite the militants’ ongoing attacks against shipping in the Red Sea corridor. While the Houthis did not claim the attack, at least one Houthi official praised it as being “the beginning and an indication of a harsh future awaiting the invaders.” Meanwhile, US warplanes carried out new strikes targeting Houthi positions that lasted into early yesterday morning, the US military said. The strikes come after the militants likely shot down yet another US reconnaissance drone over the country. The attack on the Saudi troops took place on Friday night in Seiyun, a city about 500km east of Sanaa. As troops worked out at a Saudi-led base there, the soldier opened fire, killing an officer and a noncommissioned officer, the state-run Saudi Press Agency said, citing a military statement. “The Joint Forces Command underscores that this ‘Lone Wolf’ cowardly attack does not represent the honorable members of the Yemeni Ministry of Defense,” the statement added.
MEXICO
Gunmen kill 10 people
Gunmen in a truck pulled up to a bar in central Mexico and opened fire, killing 10 people in an area that had been spared the worst of the country’s raging criminal violence, authorities said. The attack on Los Cantaritos bar in Queretaro’s downtown district left 10 people dead inside and at least seven injured, the city’s public security department chief Juan Luis Ferrusca said. “Emergency services arrived at the scene and confirmed that at least four people armed with long weapons had arrived on board a pickup truck,” Ferrusca said in a video on social media. One suspect was detained and the vehicle used in the attack was found abandoned and set on fire, he said, adding that there were no reports of similar incidents in the city. The victims included three women, the Queretaro state prosecutor’s office, which said forensic experts were examining the scene of the attack and the vehicle.
CUBA
Protesters arrested
The government on Saturday said it arrested an unspecified number of people who staged demonstrations when a hurricane left the island without power for the second time in weeks. Street protests are very rare in communist-run Cuba. The prosecutor’s office said those arrested in Havana and the central provinces of Mayabeque and Ciego de Avila were being charged with assault, public disorder and property damage. Hurricane Rafael knocked power out on Wednesday after hitting the west of the Caribbean island of 10 million people as a major Category 3 storm. The blackout lasted two days. It came just two weeks after Hurricane Oscar, which left eight dead in the east of the island during a national electricity blackout caused by the failure of the island’s biggest power plant and a shortage of fuel. The government said that half of the people of Havana now have electricity again, but much of the capital and the neighboring province of Artemisa do not. Those detained after protesting were being held “for acts of aggression against authorities and territorial inspectors, causing injuries and public disturbances,” the prosecutor’s office said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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