AP, Bangui
The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Central African Republic is requesting about 750 more troops to help fill a “security vacuum” worsened by the withdrawal of U.S. special forces as violence surges again, according to a confidential cable obtained by The Associated Press.
The additional troops are needed in the southeast after the withdrawal this year of U.S. and Ugandan troops hunting the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, according to the message from mission head Parfait Onanga-Anyanga to the U.N.’s head of peacekeeping operations in New York.
Two militants killed near Kashmir LoC
Xinhua, Srinagar
At least two militants were killed Saturday in a gunfight near the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir, officials said.
The gunfight, according to Indian army officials, broke out in Machil sector of frontier Kupwara district, about 165 km northwest of Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir.
According to Indian military spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia, the militants were trying to infiltrate deep inside Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Two children die in Ukraine camp fire
AFP, Kiev
A fire swept through a children’s camp in Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odessa, killing two girls and leaving a third one missing, the authorities said on Saturday.
The fire broke out late Friday in the camp’s wooden two-storey building where children slept in the resort city of Odessa some 440 kilometres (south of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, the emergencies state service said.
Troops kill 18 Burundian refugees in DR Congo
Reuters, Kinshasa
Congolese security forces killed at least 18 Burundian refugees during clashes over plans to send some of them home, local activists and a diplomatic source said. Police and soldiers opened fire as the refugees protested over the plan and tried to free some of their arrested compatriots in the town of Kamanyola in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday, the sources said.
Typhoon Doksuri kills 8 in Vietnam
Xinhua, Hanoi
Typhoon Doksuri has killed eight people and injured 28 others in Vietnam’s central region by Saturday noon, according to provincial flood and storm prevention bureaus.
Doksuri also damaged over 100,000 houses, sank ten fishing ships and boats, and undermined some 1,000 hectares of vegetables and fruit trees and cash crops, the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said, noting that most of rice crop had been harvested before the typhoon made landfall at the central region on Friday.
