Fire routs 1,500 refugees from France camp

PARIS — It began with an argument, the latest between Afghan and Kurdish migrants living side by side in a camp in northern France.

After the fight Monday night came a fire that devastated the wooden barracks on the outskirts of Grande-Synthe, near the port of Dunkirk, and forced 1,500 people to flee into the surrounding fields. By dawn, all that remained were a few makeshift homes among smoldering ashes and a plume of smoke.

About a dozen people were left with minor injuries after the fight, local officials said, which they described as an uprising in which a few migrants set fire to the camp with the intention of destroying it. It took 60 firefighters to bring the flames under control.

By noon Tuesday, as many as 600 migrants, mainly women and children, had found shelter in one of three local community halls, while others camped outside. About a thousand other people were still unaccounted for, said Olivier Caremelle, a spokesman for the Grande-Synthe mayor.

Guilty plea expected

STOCKHOLM — The man accused of killing four people by steering a stolen beer truck into a crowd in Stockholm last week intends to plead guilty, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Appearing in public for the first time since his capture, the suspect, Rakhmat Akilov, 39, entered Sweden’s largest secured courtroom, a subterranean space at Stockholm District Court that is only three-quarters of a mile from the pedestrian street where the authorities say he rammed the truck into a crowd shortly before 3 p.m. Friday. He was arrested about five hours later in a suburb north of Stockholm.

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The U.N. Security Council is welcoming a call by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to move to a new type of presence in Haiti by withdrawing peacekeepers after nearly 13 years and scaling back its $346 million-a-year stabilization mission to focus more on police, human rights and justice. ... Tomas Yarrington Ruvalcaba, 60, former governor of a drug-ravaged Mexican state of Tamaulipas, who had been on the run since 2012 from both U.S. and Mexican justice on charges of money laundering and racketeering, has been captured in Italy, officials in Rome said Monday. ... Caracas, Venezuela, police fired tear gas Monday at an opposition march led by deputies of the National Assembly against Supreme Court justices they accused of carrying out a coup, injuring scores of demonstrators.