World briefs

VIETNAM With China and the U.S. as its largest export destinations, Vietnam is seeking ways to insulate itself from an escalating trade war between the world’s two biggest economies.

JAPAN yesterday approved its first national legislation banning smoking inside of public facilities, but the watered-down measure excludes many restaurants and bars and is seen as toothless.

AFGHANISTAN Officials say gunmen have abducted a team of 12 mine-clearing workers in eastern Kunar province.

INDIA A six-story building under construction collapsed onto an adjacent building east of the Indian capital, killing at least three people and trapping several others under the debris, police said yesterday. More on p13

TURKEY’s state-run news agency says President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has filed complaints against the main opposition party leader and 72 legislators accusing them of insults for posting and sharing a cartoon on social media that depicts him as a variety of different animals.

IRAN continues to acquire uranium and is close to finishing a factory where it can build more centrifuges to enrich it, the country’s nuclear chief said yesterday, adding also that uranium stockpiles have nearly doubled in the last few years.

EGYPT’s parliament has passed a bill targeting popular social media accounts that authorities accuse of publishing “fake news,” the latest move in a five-year-old drive to suppress dissent and silence independent sources of news.

GERMANY Authorities plan to bring back to Germany an Afghan asylum-seeker who apparently was deported mistakenly while legal proceedings were still ongoing in his case.

ITALY-SPAIN An aid group says it won’t dock its boat in an Italian port and that instead it’s seeking a go-ahead to disembark in Spain with the woman who survived a migrant boat wreck and the dead bodies of another woman and a toddler.

NICARAGUA Police and armed pro-government civilians laid siege to and then retook a symbolically important neighborhood that had recently become a center of resistance to President Daniel Ortega’s government.

BRAZIL Police in Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul said that the mother of a famous soccer star was rescued from kidnappers.

US-HONDURAS Federal authorities in New York filed charges against a Honduran congressman accused of being a member of a violent drug trafficking organization responsible for shipping loads of cocaine into the United States.