World briefs

TAIWAN Veteran Chinese director Feng Xiaogang has picked up the best director award for his social satire “I Am Not Madame Bovary” at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards, considered the equivalent of the Oscars for Mandarin-language cinema.

ABU DHABI With Lewis Hamilton purposefully slowing him down, two other drivers hard on his tail and the title on the line, German driver Nico Rosberg held his nerve to win the Formula One championship for the first time. 

NEW ZEALAND Seven people are dead and another person is missing after a chartered fishing boat disappeared from view in large waves at the entrance to a harbor near Auckland.

PHILIPPINE troops backed by aircraft have assaulted local sympathizers of the Islamic State group, including dozens of militants who took cover in an unoccupied Islamic school in the country’s south, military officials say.

AUSTRALIA Six people have died and five remained on life support after a rare condition known as thunderstorm asthma struck Australia’s second-largest city.

SWISS voters rejected a plan to accelerate the country’s exit from nuclear energy in a referendum yesterday, turning down an initiative that would have forced their government to shut the last plant in 2029.

TURKISH authorities have detained two reporters working for foreign news organizations in southeast Turkey, the latest journalists taken into custody as part of the government’s sweeping crackdown following July’s failed coup.

SYRIAN government forces advanced deep into eastern Aleppo yesterday amid a swift collapse of rebel defenses inside the divided northern city, threatening to cleave the opposition’s enclave between its northern and southern parts.

UGANDA More than four dozen people have been killed in fighting between Ugandan forces and a tribal militia in a remote district near the border with Congo, Ugandan officials said yesterday as security forces battled armed men protecting a tribal king who is accused of leading the rebels.

BRAZILIAN President Michel Temer lost a key aide on Friday after being dragged into an influence-trafficking scandal that threatens to revive political uncertainty in Latin America’s largest economy. Geddel Vieira Lima, Temer’s top congressional liaison, stepped down after he and the president were accused of exerting undue pressure to construct a building in which Lima has a stake.