World Briefs

CHINA’s ruling Communist Party recruited almost 15 percent fewer new members last year amid hopes that better-qualified candidates will expand its guiding role in Chinese society.

CHINA-USA Chinese authorities have arrested a former University of Iowa student in southeastern China and say they will prosecute him in the killing of his girlfriend in Iowa, where her body was found stuffed into the truck of her car, police said. An Iowa City police news release issued Monday said Li Xiangnan, 23, surrendered to police in Wenzhou on May 13 and was arrested on June 19 to face a charge of intentional homicide.

THAILAND The U.N. human rights office calls on Thailand’s junta to release 14 student activists and drop the charges that were filed against them for holding a peaceful anti-coup rally.

JAPAN Of countless ghostly abandoned factories and mines in Japan, Battleship Island is among the most notorious. It is one of 23 old industrial facilities seeking UNESCO’s recognition as World Heritage sites.

PHILIPPINES The Philippines’ anti-graft prosecutor ordered the national police chief and 10 other officers dismissed for approving a contract to deliver gun licenses with a courier company that had no track record.

EGYPT deploys heavy security forces across Cairo amid preparations for the burial of the country’s prosecutor general, killed in a car bombing the day before in the first assassination of a top Egyptian official in a quarter century. The body of Hisham Barakat, the top judicial official in charge of overseeing the prosecution of thousands of Islamists, including former President Mohammed Morsi, has been moved from the hospital to a mosque in the eastern suburb of Heliopolis for a funeral after noon prayers.

PHILIPPINES-MALAYSIA Malaysia commutes to life imprisonment the death sentence of a Filipino woman convicted of smuggling 5 kilograms of cocaine.

AUSTRALIA The first openly gay U.S. ambassador to Australia says he is confident that the “great debate” among Australians on whether to allow gay marriages will result in the best outcome for the country.

IRAN’s foreign minister returns to the nuclear talks in Vienna where negotiators are struggling to overcome significant differences and preparing to work through yesterday’s deadline for a deal.

FRANCE WikiLeaks has released documents that it says show that the U.S. National Security Agency eavesdropped on France’s top finance officials and high-stakes French export bids over a decade in what the group called targeted economic espionage.

UKRAINE  Fire has engulfed a large section of the exclusion zone around the destroyed Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities said yesterday. It was unclear if the blaze has hit parts of the zone heavily contaminated by radiation from the 1986 reactor explosion and fire, although authorities said the flames swept through about 130 hectares