World briefs

XINJIANG Two men have been sentenced to death and another to life imprisonment for killing a pro-government Muslim cleric in China’s far-western city of Kashgar, state media said yesterday. A court in Kashgar on Sunday convicted Gheni Hasan and Nurmemet Abidilimit of organizing and leading a terrorist group as well as intentional homicide, and sentenced them to death, the government-run news portal Tianshan Net said. The third man, Atawulla Tursun, was convicted of participating in the terror group and sentenced to life in prison, Tianshan said.

CHINESE customs authorities say a policeman died after about 20 Vietnamese citizens attacked him and other officers who had impounded a vessel suspected of smuggling in the southern province of Yunnan. The Kunming customs district said yesterday that Li Shunlin and seven other police officers were taking the impounded boat to a pier last week when a Vietnamese vessel entered Chinese territory on the Red River.

JAPAN-N.KOREA Negotiators from North Korea and Japan meet in a northeastern Chinese city for talks on the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents. The meeting between Japan’s Junichi Ihara and North Korea’s Song Il-ho in Shenyang was expected to last only one day, with Japan expected to pressure the North Korean delegation to produce a preliminary report on the issue.

N. KOREA The world’s most famous North Korean disappears from public view for three weeks, and state media gently note that he has been ill. That has set off a global smorgasbord of speculation about what’s eating Kim Jong Un: maybe gout brought on by a cheese obsession, or too much fried chicken and beer. More on p12

AFGHANISTAN Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai is sworn in as Afghanistan’s new president, replacing Hamid Karzai in the country’s first democratic transfer of power since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban. More on p13

UK Britain’s governing Conservatives were struggling to focus attention on their economic policies yesterday after a government minister sent an explicit photo to a tabloid journalist posing on Twitter as a young party supporter. Brooks Newmark resigned as minister for civil society after learning that the recipient of a suggestive snapshot of himself wearing paisley pajamas was a male reporter for the Sunday Mirror tabloid, rather than a young woman named Sophie.

ISRAEL It used to be that if you wanted to join one of the world’s most secretive espionage organizations you had to sneak into a foreign embassy, answer a cryptic newspaper ad or show up in a nondescript building in Tel Aviv to meet a shadowy recruiter. Now all it takes to apply for a job at Israel’s Mossad spy agency is a click of the mouse. The typically shadowy Mossad revamped its website last week to include a snazzy recruiting video and an online application option for those seeking employment.

USA Gov. Jerry Brown announces that he signed a bill that makes California the first in the nation to define when “yes means yes” and adopt requirements for colleges to follow when investigating sexual assault reports.

SPAIN The Spanish intend to challenge the decision of the powerful northeastern region of Catalonia to call an independence referendum.

UKRAINE  East Ukraine suffers the worst violence in more than a week, as fighting between pro-Russian rebels and government troops in the region kills at least 12 people and wounds 32.