World briefs

S KOREA’s president is cracking down on rumors in cyberspace in a campaign that threatens the popularity of Kakao Talk, the leading social media service in a country with ambitions to become a global technology leader.

SWEDEN For the world’s first baby born to a woman with a transplanted womb — a medical first — only a victorious name would do. Which is why his parents named him “Vincent,” meaning “to conquer,” according to his mother. The 36-year-old Swedish mother said she learned she had no womb when she was 15 and was devastated. The feat opens up a new but still experimental alternative for some of the thousands of women who are unable to have children because they lost a uterus to cancer or were born without one.

IRAQ Militants from the Islamic State group yesterday publicly killed six Iraqi soldiers captured in an embattled western province where the extremists continue to advance despite an expanding U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes, residents said. The killings took place in the town of Hit, about 140km west of the capital, Baghdad, which the Islamic State fighters overran on Thursday night.

BULGARIANS voted in a parliamentary election yesterday, hoping that a new government will end the country’s political stalemate, revive its flagging economy, solve a severe banking crisis and find ways to ease Moscow’s grip on its energy supplies. Opinion surveys have predicted the biggest vote winner will be the center-right GERB party led by a former prime minister, Boyko Borisov, but say it’s expected to fall short of a majority. The 55-year-old could face an uphill battle trying to build a coalition government.

USA Thomas Duncan, the man who would become the nation’s first Ebola patient, helped rush an expectant mother from his neighborhood to the hospital in disease-ravaged Liberia. Four days later, he got on an airplane in a cross-continental journey that took him from Africa to Europe to Dallas. The fever symptoms began appearing a few days later, and he went to an emergency room to get checked out. He was sent home and given antibiotics. By the next week, he was diagnosed with Ebola. He has now become the center of a growing global epidemic in the U.S.

HAITI Jean-Claude-Duvalier, the self-proclaimed “president for life” of Haiti whose corrupt and brutal regime sparked a popular uprising that sent him into a 25-year exile, died of a heart attack, his attorney said. Reynold George said the 63-year-old ex-leader died at his home.