World Briefs

CHINA A tornado and hailstorm killed at least 98 people as it swept over a city’s outskirts of the city of Yancheng in Jiangsu province, destroying buildings, smashing trees and flipping vehicles on roofs.

THAILAND Rescuers are searching for an air force helicopter a day after contact was lost during heavy rains. Radar contact with the Bell UH-1 helicopter with three crewmen aboard was lost Saturday afternoon and an initial search was suspended due to the rains. Air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Pongsak Semachai said yesterday that the helicopter was on a mission to resupply a radar station in Chanthaburi province, 215 kilometers east of Bangkok.

INDONESIA Suspected militants in the southern Philippines boarded an Indonesian tugboat and abducted seven of 13 crew members in a third such attack in the volatile region, the Indonesian foreign minister said Friday. The crewmen were believed to be taken by two separate groups to a jungle camp in Sulu, a predominantly Muslim province about 950 kilometers south of the Philippine capital, Manila, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi told a news conference in Jakarta.

USA Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Saturday that he wouldn’t characterize his immigration policies as including “mass deportations,” drawing a sharp retort from the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump, in an interview at his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, said that rather than a blanket ban on Muslims coming to the U.S., a position he took in late 2015, he’d focus on those from countries with links to terrorists.

SPANIARDS headed to the polls yesterday for an unprecedented repeat election that aims to break six months of political deadlock after a December ballot left the country without an elected government.

ITALY’s second most sought-after fugitive, a convicted, ruthless ‘ndrangheta crime syndicate boss, was captured Sunday as he slept in his bed in a hideout in the rugged Calabrian mountains, police and prosecutors said. Ernesto Fazzalari “went from his sleep to the handcuffs of the Carabinieri” paramilitary police after 20 years on the run, Col. Lorenzo Falferi told reporters in Reggio Calabria.

SOMALIA A Cabinet minister is among the 15 killed in an Islamic extremist attack on a hotel in the capital, police say. Four attackers also died in the assault which was claimed by al-Shabab, Somalia’s militant rebels who are allied to al-Qaida. At least 34 people were injured, according to police and hospital sources.