World briefs

PHILIPPINES Pope Francis flew home yesterday after a weeklong trip to Asia, where he called for unity in Sri Lanka after a civil war and asked Filipinos to be “missionaries of the faith” in the world’s most populous continent after a record crowd joined his final Mass in the Philippine capital.

CHINA has requested that the Myanmar government protect the safety and legitimate rights of Chinese nationals who were arrested over illegal logging, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday. A total of 146 people, including 126 Chinese nationals, were arrested in raids on illegal logging that began Jan. 4 in Myanmar’s conflict-stricken northern Kachin State, according to state media reports.

CHINA Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson and actor Richard Armitage were in Beijing yesterday to promote “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies”, the finale of the fantasy epic which will hit Chinese cinemas on Friday.

NORTH KOREA A prominent North Korean defector who fled a prison camp and became the face of international efforts to hold the country accountable for widespread human rights abuses has changed important parts of his life story.

JAPAN’s leading opposition Democratic Party chose 61-year-old Harvard-trained former Deputy Prime Minister Katsuya Okada as its top leader. He faces the daunting challenge of uniting and rebuilding public trust in the Democratic Party, which has yet to recover from its electoral defeat by the Liberal Democrats in late 2012.

UKRAINE’s president vows to reassert government control over eastern regions as the army unleashed a counter-offensive against Russian-backed separatist fighters vying for command over the airport in the city of Donetsk.

QATAR A Qatari man declared an enemy combatant by the Bush administration following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and imprisoned over links to al-Qaida returns home to the Gulf nation after quietly being released by U.S. authorities. Ali al-Marri was held without charge for nearly six years in a U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina before eventually pleading guilty and receiving a sentence of just over eight years behind bars.

CAMEROON-NIGERIA Boko Haram attacked a village in northern Cameroon early Sunday, killing three people and staging its largest kidnapping yet in the country, the information minister said, adding that some of the hostages were children. In a separate attack in Nigeria, a suicide bomber killed four people and injured 35 others in the northeast town of Potiskum, according to a Nigerian media outlet. The Cameroon attack occurred in Mabass village, in the Far North region, Issa Tchiroma Bakary said. He said 80 houses were destroyed and “between 30 and 50” people were believed to have been abducted.

BELGIUM The European Union yesterday called for an anti-terror alliance with Arab countries to boost cooperation and information-sharing in the wake of deadly attacks and arrests across Europe.

USA The new leader of the House of Representatives panel overseeing U.S. policy to Asia and the Pacific is a rarity in Congress. Congressman Matt Salmon is a deeply conservative Republican who shuns isolationism, favors closer ties with Asia and stands poised to praise as well as criticize China — and even do it in Mandarin.