World briefs

CHINA A lawyer says a parent upset about the end of an experimental teaching program at a Beijing elementary school has been detained on suspicion of causing trouble. Lawyer Zhou Ze says Beijing police also searched the home of Cao Baoyin, a former journalist who now works in children’s literature. Cao and other parents protested the end of the previously government-sanctioned New Education project, which emphasized intensive reading at an elementary school associated with the No. 2 Fengtai Middle School.

CHINESE state media say police have detained the publisher and the general manager of an influential business publication. The official Xinhua News Agency said yesterday that police detained Shen Hao, publisher of the 21st Century Business Herald, and general manager Chen Dongyang, but did not say what charges they might face.

CHINA and Spain signed business deals worth USD4 billion yesterday as Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy visited the Asian powerhouse to seek support for Spain’s struggling economy.

CYPRUS A cruise ship was trying to rescue hundreds of people stranded aboard a small boat off Cyprus, and officials said they are apparently refugees who fled Syria. Salamis Cruise Lines Managing Director Kikis Vasiliou told The Associated Press that one of its cruise ships has been instructed to change course and pick up the estimated 300 people, mostly women and children.

INDIA’s space agency released the first image of the crater-scarred and dry surface of Mars taken by the nation’s first interplanetary spacecraft after it began orbiting the red planet. The image released yesterday was taken when the Martian Orbiter Mission, or MOM, was about 7,300 km from the planet’s surface, according to the Indian Space and Research Organisation. The digital data took at least 12 minutes to reach Earth.

N KOREA An American man recently sentenced by North Korea to six years of hard labor says he is working eight hours a day digging in fields and being kept in isolation, but that so far his health isn’t deteriorating.

N KOREA’s young leader isn’t in his customary seat as the country convenes its rubber-stamp parliament, adding to media speculation in South Korea that Kim Jong Un may be ill.

AUSTRALIA A terror suspect shot dead after he stabbed two Australian counterterrorism police officers may not have been acting alone as originally thought, a lead investigator says.

UK The British prime minister said late Wednesday he will ask Parliament to approve joining international airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq. David Cameron announced the move in his address to the U.N. General Assembly.