World briefs

CHINA’s military is staging live-firing exercises in the country’s west as part of a series of drills involving more than 140,000 troops, state media reported yesterday. The “Joint Action-2015D” exercises in the Chengdu Military Region are the first of five such drills involving units from the army, navy, air force, missile corps and other branches of the armed forces, the Xinhua News Agency said.

BANGLADESH A war crimes tribunal in Bangladesh sentences one man to death and another to life in prison for collaborating with Pakistan to commit mass killings and other crimes during the 1971 war for independence.

AUSTRALIA Australia is criticized over its new greenhouse-gas reduction target which lags behind the ambitions of most wealthy countries.

INDIA Opposition lawmakers block Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to simplify India’s taxation laws, a key part of his plans to boost Asia’s third-biggest economy.
INDONESIA’s top development official says the government is studying proposals from China and Japan to build a high-speed rail line and expects to announce the outcome later this month.  More on p12

USA Two more people in the New York City borough of the Bronx have died of Legionnaires’ disease, bringing the death toll to 12 in the largest outbreak of the disease in New York City history, officials said yesterday.

USA Local officials in towns downstream from where millions of gallons of mine waste spilled into a southwest Colorado river are demanding answers about possible long-term threats to the water supply. Colorado and New Mexico declared stretches of the Animas and San Juan rivers to be disaster areas as the orange-colored waste stream made its way downstream toward Lake Powell in Utah after the spill Wednesday at the abandoned Gold King mine near Silverton, Colorado.

GREECE Fights break out among migrants on the Greek island of Kos, where overwhelmed authorities are struggling to contain increasing numbers of people arriving clandestinely on rubber dinghies from the nearby Turkish shore.

SPAIN A team of Spanish police experts flew to the French island of Corsica yesterday to retrieve a masterpiece by Pablo Picasso that was smuggled out of Spain, where it is considered a national treasure. A spokesman for Spain’s Civil Guard said four police experts in national heritage and several Culture Ministry officials flew to recover the painting, “Head of a Young Woman,” which is valued at 24 million euros (USD26 million). The work is owned by Spanish banker Jaime Botin, brother of the late Emilio Botin, former head of the Santander banking group.

SYRIA  The head of the World Food Program tells The Associated Press there will likely be more cuts in food aid for desperate Syrian refugees because the U.N. agency’s funding outlook is “bleak.”

MEXICO Miguel Angel Jimenez, a political activist who played a prominent early role in the search for 43 students and other missing people in southern Mexico, was slain over the weekend, an associate said Monday. The bullet-ridden body of Jimenez, a member of the Union of Towns and Organizations, or UPOEG for its initials in Spanish, was found in a car near a town where he had helped found a community police program.