New storm aims toward Caribbean

Compiled from news services

Caribbean islands devastated by Hurricane Irma last week may get another hurricane by Monday, National Hurricane Center forecasters said Saturday.

A system about 755 miles east-southeast of the Lesser Antilles was expected to become a tropical storm Saturday as it heads west at a quick 22 mph. Forecasters expect the storm — Maria is the next name up — to become a Category 1 hurricane in the next few days.

Tropical storm watches have been issued for St. Lucia, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Dominica.

The system does not yet have an eye, making it hard to predict what track it will take..

Iceland has election date

Icelanders are being called to the polls after a sex-crime scandal involving the prime minister’s father caused the collapse of the country’s threeparty coalition government that was formed only eight months ago.

Elections have been proposed for Nov. 4, subject to parliamentary approval, after President Gudni Th. Johannesson accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson Saturday.

The prime minister’s father, Benedikt Sveinsson, wrote a letter to the Justice Ministry calling for the criminal record of a convicted sex offender to be erased. The man had been sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison in 2004 for the sexual abuse of his underage stepdaughter.

Syrian kids in school

In a classroom, light filtered in through a gaping hole in the ceiling, with crumbling concrete and exposed steel bars suspended overhead. The building was damaged at some point during Syria’s brutal six-year conflict that has turned this residential area outside Damascus, the capital, into a battleground.

Amid such destruction, Syrian children returned to classes — despite the war still going on around them — in the rebel-held suburb of Douma on the northeastern outskirts of Damascus.

Government airstrikes are still a regular occurrence in Douma, as President Bashar Assad’s forces fight to wrest control of the area from opposition groups.

International monitoring groups say the government has deliberately targeted schools and hospitals in rebel-held areas in the past.

Vast Bangladesh camp

BANGKOK— Bangladesh, facing an unprecedented influx of ethnic Rohingya, plans to build a vast camp to house about 400,000 refugees who have poured into the country the past three weeks.

The new settlements will be built within the next 10 days on 2,000 acres in the Cox’s Bazar district near Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar, officials have said.

Officials plan to construct 14,000 shelters, each with the capacity to hold six families, with the help of international aid organizations and the Bangladesh military.

Camps were already overflowing with at least 400,000 Rohingya before the current exodus was provoked by Rohingya militants’ attacking Myanmar police posts and an army base on Aug. 25.

The Myanmar military then began a campaign of village torchings, extrajudicial killings.

The United Nations described the actions against the Rohingya as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”