World briefs

CHINA Heavy downpours in China’s southwest have killed seven people and left three others missing, state media reported yesterday. Authorities in Linshui county in Sichuan province rescued 604 people and relocated more than 23,300 to safer places following the rains that lasted for 18 hours Saturday, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Footage broadcast on CCTV showed soldiers rescuing residents trapped in apartment buildings surrounded by high waters. China’s meteorological center forecast heavy rain would continue in southwest and central China until this afternoon.

HONG KONG  Sabine Lisicki won her first WTA title in three years by defeating Karolina Pliskova 7-5, 6-3 in the final of the Hong Kong Open yesterday. No. 36-ranked Pliskova squandered a 5-1 lead in the match after she twice broke the top-seeded German in the first set before losing the next six games. Lisicki fired five aces in the second set and twice broke her Czech opponent’s serve, in the fourth and eight games, to clinch the final in just under 90 minutes. Lisicki won her last WTA title in Dallas in 2011. It was also her third victory against Pliskova this year after victories at Wimbledon and at the Madrid Open.

PHILIPPINES Rescuers saved about 100 people overnight and recovered two bodies from a ferry that sank in rough seas after encountering steering trouble in the central Philippines, officials said. More on p12

NORTH KOREA’s Supreme Court yesterday sentenced a 24-year-old American man to six years of hard labor for entering the country illegally to commit espionage. More on p13

SIERRA LEONE has lost a fourth doctor to Ebola after a failed effort to transfer her abroad for medical treatment, a government official said yesterday, a huge setback to the impoverished country that is battling the virulent disease amid a shortage of health care workers. Dr. Olivet Buck died late Saturday, hours after the World Health Organization said it could not help medically evacuate her to Germany, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brima Kargbo confirmed to The Associated Press.

UKRAINE Several residential neighborhoods in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk have come under repeated shelling, imperiling a fragile cease-fire agreement imposed last week. That part of the city is closest to the government-held airport, which has become the site of increasingly intense fighting between the pro-Russian separatists and Kiev’s forces. Volodymyr Polyovyi, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told journalists yester day that Ukrainian troops had repelled an attack at the airport by about 200 fighters during the night. He said there were no military casualties.

SWEDEN’s parliamentary election opened yesterday with polls showing the left-leaning Social Democrats poised to return to power after eight years of center-right rule.

USA Greg Norman is recovering from a chain saw accident that nearly cost him his left hand. Norman, the Hall of Fame golfer and entrepreneur, was cutting back trees in his South Florida home when the weight of a branch pulled his left hand toward the chain saw. He said the blade hit him just below where a person would be wearing a wrist watch. He said doctors told him it missed his artery by a fraction of an inch.