AP, Caracas
Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez was returned home to serve his sentence under house arrest, days after being hauled back to prison in the middle of the night in a move that drew international condemnation.
The activist’s wife Lilian Tintori said in a message on Twitter late Saturday that she and her husband remained committed to achieving “peace and freedom for Venezuela.”
Fire strikes another tower in the Dubai Marina
AP, Dubai
A fire broke out Sunday at another high-rise tower in the Dubai Marina, just days after a blaze struck one of the world’s tallest residential towers in the same neighborhood.
Authorities quickly extinguished Sunday’s fire at the Tiger Tower and said it injured no one. But the blaze rattled nerves after Friday’s inferno at the Torch Tower, which is only a block away from the site of Sunday’s fire.
Abbas pledges to ramp up Gaza sanctions
AFP, Gaza City
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has pledged to increase sanctions on the Gaza Strip, drawing a fresh attack from its Hamas rulers.
Abbas, the leader of the internationally-recognised Palestinian government based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has been seeking to weaken Islamists Hamas by cutting power supplies to crowded Gaza.
On Saturday, he said he would continue with sanctions on the coastal strip, despite UN concerns that it amounts to collective punishment of its two million residents.
Tunisia loses swathes of forest in fires
AFP, Tunis
Around 2,000 hectares of forest in Tunisia have gone up in flames over the past week, with some of the fires probably started deliberately, the authorities said on Saturday. Many of the blazes have been put down to a heatwave gripping the North African country, but arson has also been blamed in some cases. “Since July 29 we have experienced a wave of forest fires — 94 outbreaks across eight provinces,” emergency services spokesman Salah Korbi told a news conference.
