World briefs

USA A crowded commuter train slammed into a sport utility vehicle on the tracks at a suburban New York crossing and burst into flames, killing seven people and seriously injuring nearly a dozen, authorities said. The collision involving a Metro-North Railroad train and a Jeep Cherokee happened Tuesday evening in Valhalla, about 32 kilometers north of New York City.

CHINA Ten people, including four children, were killed in an accident involving a minibus in southern China yesterday, also the first day for the peak travel season centered on the Chinese New Year, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Xinhua said another three people were seriously hurt in the accident in the southern Chinese city of Meizhou.

INDONESIA’s government is preparing to execute eight drug smugglers, including seven foreigners, an official said Tuesday. The spokesman for the attorney general’s office, Tony Tribagus Spontana, said two Australians, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, are among the foreigners. He did not provide the others’ nationalities, but the attorney general earlier told Parliament that they are from Brazil, Nigeria, France, Ghana and the Philippines.

THAILAND Authorities in Thailand have issued arrest warrants for two suspects believed linked to a pair of small bomb blasts outside a luxury shopping mall in downtown Bangkok over the weekend that wounded one person.
THAILAND-USA The United States will conduct live-fire training at an upcoming military exercise in Thailand despite saying it would be focusing the drills on nonlethal security cooperation, a U.S. official says.

SRI LANKA’s president says the country has not been able to unite the hearts and minds of ethnic groups despite ending a decades-old civil war five years ago. In his Independence Day address, President Maithripala Sirisena called on all political leaders to ask themselves what went wrong in the 67 years since independence from Britain.

USA-CHINA The U.S. defense intelligence chief warns that America’s technological edge over China is at risk because of cybertheft. Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart also says Chinese military training and weaponry pose a significant threat to U.S. forces in the western Pacific.

UK A Venetian waterscape by Claude Monet has sold for more than USD35 million as the high-end art market shows resilience in a bumpy global economy. “Le Grand Canal,” fetched 23.67 million pounds ($35.6 million) at Sotheby’s, though it didn’t reach the top of its pre-sale estimate of 20 million pounds to 30 million pounds. Monet’s “Poplars at Giverny,” sold by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, fetched 10.79 million pounds ($16.2 million).

USA “To Kill a Mockingbird” will not be Harper Lee’s only published book after all. Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that “Go Set a Watchman,” a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, “Go Set a Watchman” is essentially a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” although it was finished earlier.