World Briefs

TAIWAN flew international media to its largest island holding in the South China Sea, Taiping Island, in a bid to reinforce its territorial claims in the disputed and increasingly tense region.

VIETNAM A court has sentenced a prominent Vietnamese blogger to five years in prison for posting anti-state writings in a one-day trial that highlights the communist country’s tough approach to dissent.

MYANMAR It emerged yesterday that a man proposed as Myanmar’s new finance and planning minister has a fake degree in finance. Kyaw Win admitted to having bought the bogus PhD from an online fictitious university which sold fake qualifications from Pakistan.

AUSTRALIA A Sydney schoolgirl has appeared in court accused on terror financing charges, which carry a maximum term of 25 years in jail. She is suspected of having sent thousands of dollars to the Islamic State group in Syria through a Western Union money transfer.

INDIA A journalist was arrested and beaten in police custody after he criticized the police on social media and demanded a law protecting reporters in a region embroiled in a decades-long Maoist insurgency, his lawyer and brother said.

PAKISTAN’s president Mamnoon Hussain praises his country’s security forces and pledges to fight against terrorism.

BRAZIL A Brazilian Supreme Court justice rejects a motion that would have let former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva take a cabinet post.

U.S.-RUSSIA American Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Moscow for talks on Ukraine and Syria with Russia’s counterpart Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin. The talks come after last week’s surprise announcement of Russia’s partial military withdrawal from Syria.

SOMALIA’s prime minister has publicly backed a campaign to ban female genital mutilation from his country. The United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, estimates that more than 90 percent of Somali girls undergo the practice.