World Briefs

HONG KONG Revelers dressed up as Donald Trump and several movie characters as they watched Fiji clinch its 16th title at Hong Kong’s biggest annual social event, the Rugby Sevens. Fiji beat New Zealand by 21 points to 7 yesterday in the final match of the three-day event.

JAPAN Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized countries are meeting in the western Japanese city of Hiroshima until today.

BELGIUM The extremists who struck Brussels last month and killed 32 people initially planned to launch a second assault on France in the wake of the November attacks in Paris, authorities said yesterday.

PHILIPPINE authorities said 23 people were killed and 70 injured in the deadliest encounter between soldiers and militants in the nation’s south this year.
Eighteen soldiers died in the 10-hour clash in Basilan province on Saturday, while five of the fatalities were members of the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Abu Sayyaf.

TURKEY’s state-run news agency says a Syrian journalist has been seriously wounded in an attack in Turkey — the latest victim of a series of assaults against Syrian journalists in the country.

PAKISTANI opposition leader Imran Khan yesterday called on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign over documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm that he said indicate that the premier’s sons own several offshore companies.

AUSTRALIA A state has ordered a review of how radicalized prisoners are managed after a teenage inmate reportedly carved an Islamic State motto on his army veteran cellmate’s forehead, officials said yesterday.

EL SALVADOR For nearly a week late last month, a modicum of peace appeared to have settled over El Salvador. After the country’s leading criminal gangs called a unilateral truce, violent crime suddenly plunged, and the homicide rate fell to around nine a day.

SOMALIA A car bomb killed four people when it detonated outside a restaurant in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, police said. Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-linked militant group, has waged an insurgency in the Horn of Africa nation since 2006 in a bid to impose a strict version of Islamic law.