World Briefs

CHINA’s national legislature is poised to vote this week on a draft law criticized by overseas governments for tightening controls over foreign non-governmental groups by bringing them under direct police supervision.

CAMBODIA Prime minister Hun Sen calls upon all of Cambodian society to help deal with the worst drought in at least four decades, which has left about two-thirds of the country’s 25 provinces short of water for drinking and other necessities.

PHILIPPINES  The military comes under increased pressure to rescue more than 20 foreign hostages after their Muslim extremist captors beheaded a Canadian man, but troops face a dilemma in how to succeed without endangering the remaining captives.

AUSTRALIA Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court rules that Australia’s detention of asylum seekers at a facility on the Pacific nation’s Manus Island is unconstitutional. The ruling could jeopardize Australia’s divisive policy of refusing to accept any asylum seekers who try to reach its shores by boat.

INDIA A massive fire guts the National Museum of Natural History in India’s capital, one of the country’s top museums.

TURKEY’s Islamic-rooted ruling party has denied it has plans to change the nation’s secular constitution into a religious one. The statement from senior party officials came a day after speaker Ismail Kahraman said majority-Muslim Turkey should have a religious constitution.

IRAN State TV reports that the country’s foreign ministry has summoned Switzerland’s ambassador to Tehran over a U.S. Supreme Court decision to permit the families of victims of a 1983 bombing in Lebanon and other attacks linked to Iran to collect nearly USD2 billion of frozen funds from Iran.

UK Thousands of doctors have posted picket lines outside hospitals around England in the first all-out strike in the history of the National Health Service. The 2-day strike marks the first time that even emergency services are affected by industrial action. More than 125,000 appointments and operations have been cancelled.

CUBA Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who oversaw a warming of relations with the Communist government and played a role in the secret negotiations that led to U.S.-Cuba detente, has stepped down, the Vatican announced. He is being replaced as archbishop of Havana by Juan de la Caridad Garcia Rodriguez, the archbishop of Camaguey.