World

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Rebels seized an air defence facility and attacked a military airport in eastern Syria yesterday, a monitoring group said, hitting back at an air force which President Bashar al-Assad is increasingly relying on to crush his opponents.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that US President Barack Obama had yet to present a credible military threat that could deter Iran from seeking nuclear weapons.

DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran and North Korea have signed an agreement to cooperate in science and technology, Iranian media reported yesterday, and Iran’s supreme leader declared that the two countries had “common enemies.”

LUANDA (Reuters) – Angola’s long-serving President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and his MPLA party scored a landslide win yesterday in an election criticised as one-sided and not credible by opponents and civil society activists, according to provisional results.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Hal David, a lyricist who along with Burt Bacharach wrote such hits as “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head” and “Walk on By”, died in Los Angeles yesterday aged 91, a representative said.

AHMEDABAD, India, (Reuters) – A former Indian state minister was sentenced to 28 years in jail yesterday for murder during one of the country’s worst religious riots, when up to 2,500 people, most of them Muslim, were hunted down and hacked, beaten or burnt to death in 2002.

GENEVA, (Reuters) – Swiss authorities said they had arrested Guatemala’s former chief of police yesterday in connection with a series of murders committed in the Central American country between 2004 and 2007.

UNITED NATIONS, (Reuters) – U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon warned yesterday that Haiti was struggling to cope with a cholera epidemic that has killed thousands and deteriorating conditions in tent camps as aid groups withdraw from the impoverished country due to a lack of funding.

TAMPA, Fla., (Reuters) – Republicans may have made Mitt Romney’s day with the presidential nomination he long sought, but it was Dirty Harry himself who nearly hijacked the show with a rambling diatribe against President Barack Obama – addressed to an empty chair.

LOS ANGELES, (Reuters) – Some 10,000 people who stayed in tent cabins at Yosemite National Park over the summer may be at risk for the deadly rodent-borne hantavirus, the U.S.

ISTANBUL/NEW YORK, (Reuters) – Turkey will continue to seek international backing for a foreign-protected safe zone inside Syria after a U.N.

LONDON,  (Reuters) – Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich emerged victorious yesterday from a $6 billion legal battle with his former mentor Boris Berezovsky that has laid bare the intrigue behind the post-Soviet carve-up of Russia’s vast natural resources.

PARIS,  (Reuters) – The disgraced power couple of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anne Sinclair will be played by two of France’s best-known actors, Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Adjani, in an upcoming movie about sex, politics and love on the rocks.

NEW YORK, (Reuters) – A Roman Catholic priest in New York expressed sympathy this week for some clergy who sexually abuse children, as well as for convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky, saying that it is often the “youngster” who is the seducer.

NEW ORLEANS,  (Reuters) – Torrential rain dumped by Hurricane Isaac threatened to burst a dam in Mississippi yesterday, triggering the mass evacuation of local residents, while large areas of the region were still flooded and without power but getting ready to mop up.

WASHINGTON,  (Reuters) – World food prices jumped 10 percent in July as drought parched crop lands in the United States and Eastern Europe, the World Bank said in a statement urging governments to shore up programs that protect their most vulnerable populations.

TAMPA, Fla., (Reuters) – Republican Mitt Romney urged voters yesterday to help him rebuild the U.S.

DUBAI,  (Reuters) – The U.N. chief and Egypt’s president delivered stinging speeches at a summit of developing nations in Iran yesterday, damaging the host country’s quest for global prestige and support for its nuclear programme and its policy on Syria.

UNITED NATIONS, (Reuters) – A U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria’s aid crisis achieved nothing new yesterday except to highlight global paralysis on the 17-month conflict as western powers warned that military action to secure civilian safe zones was still an option.

JOHANNESBURG, (Reuters) – South African prosecutors yesterday charged 270 striking miners with murder of 34 co-workers seen being shot dead in a hail of police bullets captured in videos broadcast around the world.