World Briefs

SYRIA In his first public address in a year, embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad vowed yesterday to win his country’s long-running civil war while acknowledging his troops had lost territory because of a shortage of manpower. Assad’s televised speech yesterday morning, given to local dignitaries in the Syrian capital, Damascus, was his first public address since he was sworn in for a third, seven-year term in July last year.

UK The former first minister of Scotland says a second referendum on Scottish independence is “inevitable.” Legislator Alex Salmond told BBC Sunday that the British government has not followed through on post-referendum promises to give Scotland more powers.

ISRAEL Police entered a holy Jerusalem site on yesterday to prevent Arab youths from attacking visiting Jews marking a biblical holiday, a police spokesman said.

INDONESIA  A strong earthquake hit off of Indonesia’s main island of Java yesterday afternoon, causing residents to pour into the streets, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, and no tsunami warning was issued.

USA Family and friends of Illinois woman Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a Texas jail, remembered her Saturday as a “courageous voice” for social justice and promised to keep fighting for clarity on the circumstances surrounding her death. Hundreds of people attended funeral near the Chicago suburb where she grew up. Mourners said they were still struggling to understand how a traffic stop for failing to use a turn signal escalated into a physical confrontation and landed her in the cell where authorities say she killed herself three days later.

USA Pluto is hazier than scientists expected and appears to be covered with flowing ice. The team responsible for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto last week released new pictures of the previously unexplored world on the edge of the solar system.

USA A new letter from intelligence investigators to the Justice Department says secret government information may have been compromised in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email server. The former secretary of state and now the leading Democratic presidential candidate remains unable to fully escape the questions surrounding her decision to run her State Department correspondence through an unsecured system set up at her New York home.

USA John Russell Houser was deeply troubled long before he shot 11 people in a movie theater in Louisiana, but decades of mental problems didn’t keep him from buying the handgun he used. Despite public signs of mental illness Houser was able to walk into an Alabama shop six years later and buy a .40-caliber handgun. It was the same weapon Houser used to kill two people and wound nine others before killing himself at a Thursday showing of “Trainwreck.” Three people remained hospitalized yesterday.