VENEZUELA President Nicolas Maduro asked for global acceptance yesterday as he cast an unusual pre-dawn vote for an all-powerful constitutional assembly that his opponents fear he’ll use to replace his country’s democracy with a single-party authoritarian system. Reports have emerged that several people were killed shortly before the voting began, including a leading candidate in the election.
VIETNAM A fire broke out at a small cake factory in Vietnam’s capital on Saturday, killing eight workers and seriously injuring two others.
PHILIPPINES Police in the southern Philippines said they fatally shot 15 people yesterday, including a city mayor, in the bloodiest assault so far in President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug crackdown.
AUSTRALIA Police disrupted the first alleged plot in Australia to bring down an airplane and arrested four men in raids on Sydney homes, officials said yesterday.
QATAR Four Arab states that cut ties with Qatar decided yesterday to refrain from immediately imposing more punitive measures against the Gulf state.
ISRAEL An Israeli military court yesterday upheld the 18-month sentence of a soldier convicted of fatally shooting a Palestinian attacker who lay on the ground wounded after stabbing and wounding another soldier.
TURKEY Seven staff members of an opposition newspaper were released from a Turkish jail pending the outcome of their trial on charges of allegedly aiding terror organizations.
GERMANY A Palestinian man who allegedly stabbed one person to death and wounded six others in Hamburg was known to authorities as a suspected Islamic radical but was also considered psychologically unstable. The man is believed to have acted alone and there are no indications he had links to any network, the Hamburg state interior minister said.
SPAIN Regional government authorities in southeastern Spain say a wildfire has forced the evacuation of 300 people and burned 1,000 hectares of pine forest.
BRAZIL Police evicted about 100 homeless families from under an overpass in downtown Sao Paulo where they had been living for months in makeshift wooden shacks.
