World briefs

CAMBODIA’s leader yesterday rejected the idea of reconciliation talks with the country’s only significant opposition party, which was dissolved by court order last November.

MYANMAR’s powerful army chief yesterday urged the country’s ethnic rebel groups to agree to a comprehensive cease-fire agreement now and stop wasting time on demands he described as impossible.

INDONESIA A court ordered an Australian man to undergo rehabilitation after finding him guilty yesterday of possessing a small amount of drugs on the tourist island of Bali.

INDIA Two journalists have been killed in separate hit-and-run incidents that rights groups and their families described as deliberate attacks.

RUSSIA Distraught and angry, thousands of Russians took to the main square of a Siberian city yesterday to confront local officials whom they blamed for a shopping mall fire that killed at least 64 people, most of them children.

IRAQ’s prime minister said yesterday that he has ordered the military to take full control of the country’s borders amid escalating tensions and Turkish threats of an incursion into Iraq to chase Kurdish rebels.

LEBANON’s state-run news agency is reporting that a Lebanese man has been charged with murdering a Filipina maid whose body was found stuffed in a freezer in Kuwait.

EGYPT Turnout appeared low yesterday as Egyptians voted on the second day of an election that President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is virtually certain to win, after all serious rivals were either arrested or intimidated into dropping out.

SERBIA-KOSOVO Kosovo Serbs set up a roadblock in northern Kosovo and their representatives walked out of Kosovo’s government yesterday a day after the arrest and expulsion of a senior Serbian government official that has refueled tensions between the Balkan foes.

ITALY Police in southern Italy have detained an Egyptian imam who ran a cultural center where he allegedly preached extremist and violent interpretations of Islam to children.

BRAZIL Appeals court judges have unanimously upheld their decision to reject former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s appeal of his conviction on corruption charges — a move that brings him one step closer to being barred from the presidential ballot and put behind bars.

MEXICO’s navy said that a helicopter called in to support marines after they were ambushed in the border city of Nuevo Laredo didn’t kill the bystanders who died. Local media reported Monday that a mother and two children were killed.