World briefs

CHINA  Heavy storms that swept through several southern Chinese provinces this past week killed 18 people and left four more missing. The storms have dumped more than 20 centimeters of rainfall in 48 hours on some towns, toppled thousands of homes, and dislocated tens of thousands of residents, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said Friday. The deaths were caused by house collapses, landslides, drowning or lightning.

INDIA Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, millions of yoga enthusiasts bend and twist their bodies in complex postures across India and much of the world to mark the first International Yoga Day.

JAPAN says it plans to resume whale hunts in the Antarctic later this year, even though the International Whaling Commission says Tokyo hasn’t proven that the mammals need to be killed for research.

JAPAN-S. KOREA  Foreign ministers from Japan and South Korea held a rare meeting yesterday on the eve of the 50th anniversary since their countries normalized relations marred by Japan’s colonization and World War II conquest. Yet ties between the two are so low that one hoped-for outcome of the meeting is an agreement for the countries’ leaders to just show up at today’s ceremonies in their respective capitals, instead of exchanging written statements.

GERMANY-EGYPT A prominent Al-Jazeera Arabic journalist is detained in Germany over an Egyptian arrest warrant, the Qatar-based broadcaster reports. Ahmed Mansour, 52, a senior journalist with the Qatar-based broadcaster’s Arabic service, was detained at Tegel airport on Saturday on an Egyptian arrest warrant, Al-Jazeera said.

SAUDI Arabia  Diplomatic documents published by WikiLeaks provide unusual insight into day-to-day diplomacy in Saudi Arabia — and a snapshot of the lavish spending habits of senior royals.

TURKEY After visiting a camp for Syrian refugees in southeastern Turkey on Saturday, actress Angelina Jolie said the world is living through an era of mass displacement. Jolie, reading from a prepared speech alongside United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees Antonio Guterres, told journalists that “never before have so many people been dispossessed or stripped of their human rights.”

USA Google plans to censor unauthorized nude photos from its influential Internet search engine in a policy change aimed at cracking down on a malicious practice known as “revenge porn.” The new rules announced Friday will allow people whose naked pictures have been posted on a website without their permission to ask Google to prevent links to the image from appearing in its search results. A form for submitting the censorship requests to Google should be available within the next few weeks.