WORLD IN BRIEF

Sunday, April 22, 2007

At Least 6 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Strikes

GAZA CITY -- Israeli forces killed at least six Palestinians on Saturday, including one in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip, in the worst flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian fighting in months.

The Israeli army said the airstrike, only the second in Gaza since a November truce, targeted fighters who had fired makeshift rockets at the Israeli border town of Sderot, hitting a house.

A top aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the Israeli actions jeopardized Abbas's efforts to expand the fragile truce from Gaza to the occupied West Bank as part of a U.S.-led peace push.

In the deadliest incident, an Israeli undercover unit killed three armed fighters while they were driving in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, local Palestinian security sources said.

In a village near Jenin, a Palestinian policeman was shot and killed by Israeli forces, Palestinian witnesses said.

They said the policeman had not been involved in any fighting in the area and was shot when he peered out his window. The Israeli army said its troops "noticed an armed militant firing from the top of a building and identified hitting him."

Later in the day, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl was shot dead by Israeli troops as she stood at her window in Jenin refugee camp, Palestinian medical workers said.

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EUROPE

· MOSCOW -- Russia's Interior Ministry insisted that riot police had acted lawfully when they broke up opposition rallies and accused protesters of faking injuries.

Police wielding batons beat, kicked and chased anti-Kremlin protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg last weekend, drawing sharp rebukes from Western governments and human rights groups.

Former chess champion turned opposition leader Garry Kasparov was detained, along with his supporters and a number of journalists and photographers. Most were released within hours.

"The protesters violated the federal law with their actions, and the police were not simply forced, they were obliged by the law, to intervene," the ministry's head of public relations told a news conference.

ASIA

· MANILA -- A Peace Corps volunteer found buried in a shallow grave in a Philippine mountain village was killed by blows to the head, and there were signs that she had tried to ward off an attack, police said.

A bloodstained wooden pole used to pound rice was found near the home of a suspect in the death of Julia Campbell, 40, a freelance journalist from Fairfax, Va., who had been teaching English in the Philippines since October.

Pedro Ganir, police chief of Ifugao province, said the suspect has gone into hiding. He said the suspect's wife had sold a Coca-Cola to Campbell before she headed off on a hike in the area's famed mountainside rice terraces, a World Heritage site.

· SEOUL -- South Korea said Sunday it would give 400,000 tons of rice to impoverished North Korea despite the communist government's failure to meet a deadline to shut down its nuclear reactor.

South Korea will ship the first batch of rice aid late next month under an agreement reached in marathon negotiations overnight in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

The move was seen as a setback in South Korea's attempt to use food aid as leverage to pressure the North to honor its pledge to shut down the reactor under a Feb. 13 nuclear disarmament deal with the U.S. and its regional partners.

· SAMDRUP JONGKHAR, Bhutan -- Thousands of Bhutanese practiced for democracy in mock elections Saturday, lining up neatly at polling stations in the latest step toward shedding nearly 100 years of absolute monarchy in the secluded Himalayan country.

Bhutan's 26-year-old king drove for two days across rugged mountains to encourage people to vote in his native village, on the border with India. The path toward 2008 parliamentary elections started with his father, who astounded his subjects four months ago by handing the throne to his Oxford-educated son.

AFRICA

· BANGUI, Central African Republic -- Thousands of people have fled fighting in northwestern Central African Republic, some swimming over the border after their homes were torched during government raids targeting rebels, local officials said.

Soldiers launched raids on villages on the northwestern border with Cameroon and Chad between Tuesday and Thursday to try to root out gunmen who attacked a town last weekend, the mayor of some of the affected settlements said.

THE AMERICAS

· SANTIAGO, Chile -- A strong earthquake rocked a part of southern Chile that has been hit by hundreds of tremors in the last three months that may be related to the birth of an undersea volcano.

The government's Emergency Bureau said preliminary reports indicate there were no victims or major damage in the sparsely populated area located in the Aysen Fjord, about 1,700 miles south of Santiago.

-- From News Services