The world in brief

Kashmir violence kills soldiers, rebels

Kashmiri villagers shout slogans during the funeral Saturday for a rebel commander and four others killed by Indian forces south of Srinagar.
Kashmiri villagers shout slogans during the funeral Saturday for a rebel commander and four others killed by Indian forces south of Srinagar.

SRINAGAR, India — A man was killed and two other people wounded Saturday when India’s army opened fire during the funeral of a rebel in disputed Kashmir, police and residents said, as seven rebels and an Indian soldier were killed in gunbattles in the region.

Soldiers descended on a village in the suburbs of southern Shopian town as thousands gathered to participate in the funeral of a rebel killed along with four others in a gunbattle with government forces in a neighboring village early Saturday, said top police officer S.P. Vaid.

Vaid said the soldiers were acting on a tip that some militants had gone to the funeral and the forces faced a barrage of stones thrown by residents.

Locals said clashes broke out after soldiers fired live ammunition at the funeral procession, killing one person. Two others were wounded.

Earlier, soldiers and counterinsurgency police cordoned off a neighborhood overnight, leading to an exchange of fire with rebels, police said. One militant was killed while four more died early Saturday.

The fighting sparked protests and clashes as hundreds of residents tried to march to the site of the battle to help the militants escape. Government forces fired warning shots, shotgun pellets and tear gas at the stone-throwing protesters, injuring at least 15 people, three of them critically.

Pompeo urges Burma to free journalists

SINGAPORE — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Burma on Saturday to immediately release two Reuters journalists held on charges of possessing secret documents.

Pompeo said in a tweet that he raised U.S. concerns about the two reporters “detained in Burma for doing their job” during a meeting with Burmese Foreign Minister Kyaw Tin on the sidelines of a regional gathering in Singapore.

“They should be released immediately,” Pompeo tweeted.

Burma is often called Myanmar, a name that military authorities adopted in 1989. Some nations, such as the United States and Britain, have refused to adopt the name change.

Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone have pleaded innocent to the charges against them and said they were framed by police, apparently because of their reporting on the crackdown by security forces on minority Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Rakhine state. About 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh after the crackdown began last August.

They face up to 14 years in prison if convicted.

Graffiti mars laureate’s Romania house

BUCHAREST, Romania — Romanian police began an investigation Saturday after anti-Semitic graffiti appeared on the house of late Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in northwest Romania.

The investigation was opened after comments in bright pink paint were scrawled overnight on Wiesel’s small house — a protected historical monument — in the town of Sighetu Marmatiei. One of the comments said Wiesel was “in hell with Hitler.”

The Romanian group for Monitoring and Fighting Anti-Semitism called it an act of vandalism against the “memory of Elie Wiesel, the memory of the Holocaust victims and the souls of the Holocaust survivors.”

The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania called for a thorough inquiry. It said Romania’s president and government have pledged to fight anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in Romania, where some have denied or downplayed the country’s role in the Holocaust.

Along with 14,000 Jews, Wiesel and his family were deported in May 1944 to the Auschwitz death camp from the town, formerly called Sighet. His mother and younger sister died there, while he and his two older sisters survived.

Bangladesh police, protesters face off

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Police in Bangladesh’s capital fired tear gas and used batons on Saturday to disperse hundreds of protesting students angry over the traffic deaths of two fellow students, leaving many people injured.

Dhaka remained largely cut off from the rest of Bangladesh as buses continued to stop arrivals from other parts of the country. The owners and workers of the bus companies have said they will not run their vehicles unless they feel safe after dozens of vehicles were either vandalized or torched in Dhaka and elsewhere.

Witnesses and media reports said Saturday’s chaos broke out in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi area as police and ruling party men swooped in on the students. A top leader of the ruling Awami League said some “criminals” wearing school uniforms joined the violence. Many protesters blamed the student wing of the ruling party for the attacks.

TV stations aired footage of the clashes, with protesters seen throwing stones at police as the chaos continued for hours.

The protests, which began last Sunday after two college students were struck and killed by a pair of buses, have paralyzed Dhaka, a city of 10 million. The two buses were racing to collect passengers, a common occurrence in the city, which is regularly gridlocked by traffic chaos.

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