RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin (pictured) has described a secret meeting with officials last year when Russia decided it would take Crimea — the Black Sea region that Moscow annexed from Ukraine last March. The Kremlin originally denied that it had sent troops into Crimea, though Putin later announced on state television that Russian troops had been sent in.
S KOREA’s president visited injured U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert amid an outpouring of public sympathy and support for the envoy who is recovering from an attack by a knife-wielding man. Lippert has been hospitalized since Thursday at Seoul’s Severance Hospital, where Park Geun-hye also received treatment in 2006 when she was knifed by a man with a box cutter during an election rally. More on p14
INDONESIA Relatives of two Australian death row prisoners made their first visit yesterday to the Indonesian prison island where the convicted drug traffickers are to be executed soon by firing squads. The two, Andrew Chan, 31, and Myuran Sukumaran, 33, were flown from the resort island of Bali to the Nusakambangan Island prison off Indonesia’s main island of Java. More on p12
LIBYA’s military spokesman says militants from the country’s Islamic State affiliate beheaded eight guards after an assault on an oil field last week during which nine foreigners were abducted. The spokesman, Ahmed al-Mesmari, also said yesterday that an employee of the al-Ghani oil field watched the beheadings and subsequently died of a heart attack.
IRAQ’s government is investigating reports that the ancient archaeological site of Khorsabad in northern Iraq is the latest to be attacked by the Islamic State militant group. Adel Shirshab, the country’s tourism and antiquities minister, told The Associated Press there are concerns the militants will remove artifacts and damage the site, located 15km northeast of Mosul.
USA An 18-month-old girl survived a car crash in a frigid Utah river after being strapped in a car seat upside-down for some 14 hours before being found by a fisherman, officers said. The condition of Lily Groesbeck was upgraded from critical to stable but critical condition at a Salt Lake City hospital, but her 25-year-old mother, Lynn Groesbeck of Springville, was found dead in the car, police said Sunday.
USA A University of Oklahoma fraternity will close and its members will be suspended after the group’s national headquarters says a video of members participating in a racist chant was posted online. Sigma Alpha Epsilon said Sunday that an investigation had validated the contents of a video showing people chanting a racial slur against blacks and indicating that blacks would never be admitted to the fraternity. The chant also references lynching. The national fraternity said in a statement that it was “embarrassed” by the “unacceptable and racist” behavior.
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