World briefs

CHINA Six nurses and a janitor were killed yesterday in a knife attack blamed on another employee at a military hospital and resort in a northeastern coastal town favored by the country’s Communist Party elite, police said. A 27-year-old employee was detained following the early morning attack at the Beidaihe Sanatorium. The location of the attack was likely to draw particular scrutiny from the Chinese public because Beidaihe is home to numerous guesthouses used by China’s leaders during the summer to vacation and hold informal meetings on government work.

CHINA Police have arrested 39 people as they broke up a telephone scam ring in southern China that tricked Malaysians into wiring them money, state media reported yesterday. Police also confiscated ill-gotten and other funds worth more than 60 million yuan (USD10 million) in southern Guangdong province, according to the official Xinhua News Agency, which cited an unnamed police spokesman in Zhuhai city. It said the ring was led by two Taiwanese men and most of the other members were Chinese Malaysians.

SRI LANKAN President Mahinda Rajapaksa calls early elections to seek a third term in office amid growing criticism of his wide-ranging powers. The move, two years before his current term expires, is seen as an attempt by Rajapaksa to prevent an expected loss of public support if an election were held according to schedule.

THAILAND Police detain three students at the opening of the latest “Hunger Games” movie in Thailand, where opponents of May’s military coup have adopted the film’s three-finger salute as a sign of defiance. The military-imposed government has banned the gesture, which symbolizes rebellion against totalitarian rule in the film series. One cinema chain in Thailand’s capital canceled all screenings of the movie ahead of its opening yesterday after a student group planned an anti-coup protest outside one of its theaters.

INDIA Indian police arrest a controversial religious leader at his sprawling ashram in the northern part of the country, ending a days-long standoff in which six people died and hundreds were injured.

PHILIPPINES A court convicts nine people of graft over a 1996 nightclub fire that killed 162 people, mostly students celebrating the end of the school year. The Sandiganbayan anti-graft court convicted seven former city engineering officials of suburban Quezon City and two operators of the Ozone disco and handed out sentences of up to 10 years.

USA NBC scraps a Bill Cosby comedy that was under development and TV Land will stop airing reruns of “The Cosby Show,” moves that came a day after another woman came forward claiming that the once-beloved comic had sexually assaulted her. The NBC sitcom and “Cosby Show” reruns joined a Netflix Cosby standup comedy special, which was indefinitely postponed, as mounting evidence of Cosby’s faltering career.

USA-IRAN U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was to travel to Vienna yesterday to join high-level nuclear negotiations with Iran as a deadline for an agreement looms. With Monday’s deadline for a deal approaching, Kerry has embarked on a frenzy of high-stakes diplomacy.

ISRAELI police yesterday handed home demolition notices to families of four Palestinian attackers from east Jerusalem, including two assailants who killed five people in a synagogue attack earlier this week, according to relatives and Palestinian officials.