New leader takes power in Malaysia
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia’s former authoritarian leader Mahathir Mohamad, 92, was sworn in as prime minister Thursday, cementing a stunning political comeback and a historic change in government after leading opposition parties to their first election victory in six decades.
The ceremony before Malaysia’s king at the official state palace in Kuala Lumpur ended a day of uncertainty during which rumors swirled that the National Front, Malaysia’s perennial ruling party, would try to stay in power. People waiting outside the palace cheered, waved opposition flags and sounded car horns.
The election result is a political earthquake for the Muslim-majority country, sweeping aside the 60-year rule of the National Front and its leader Najib Razak, whose reputation was tarnished by a monumental corruption scandal, a crackdown on dissent and a new sales tax that hurt his coalition’s poor rural supporters.
Islamic State arrests
BAGHDAD — Iraq has arrested five senior members of the Islamic State, including a top aide to the militant group’s leader, Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, in an operation that involved U.S. and Turkish intelligence support, authorities said.
The capture of the men, two Syrians and three Iraqis, represents a breakthrough in the hunt for Baghdadi, experts said, and underscores the deep security cooperation within the American-led coalition against the Islamic State despite political tensions roiling the region.
One of the men, Ismail al-Ithawi, who goes by the alias Abu Zaid al-Iraqi, is considered part of Baghdadi’s inner circle and was responsibilities for financial, religious and security portfolios across the group’s territory in Iraq and Syria, said Hisham alHashimi, an expert on Islamic State who advises the Iraqi government.
Russian general accused
WASHINGTON — A Russian major general now believed to be helping lead his country’s missile and artillery efforts in Syria was behind the indiscriminate shelling in January 2015 of a Ukrainian town that left at least 29 civilians dead.
Working off of raw video, cellphone intercepts and information from social media and military websites in Ukraine and Russia, a joint reporting team identified nine Russian officers — including Major Gen. Stepan Stepanovich Yaroschuk — thought to have been involved in the military operation that killed and injured scores of civilians.
The shells that rained down on Mariupol came from two Russian artillery batteries transported on the eve of the operation into Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
The shelling was part of Russia’s hybrid military operation in Ukraine, combining military support to ethnic Russian separatists with direct incursions into breakaway border regions. The goal was to extend Russian control in a country that was flirting with closer ties to Western Europe.
Ebola in D.R. Congo
KINSHASA — Eleven new cases of hemorrhagic fever and a death have been reported in the northwest part of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the two days since an Ebola outbreak was declared May 8.
Seven patients are hospitalized in the town of Bikoro in Equateur province, including the two who tested positive for the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus and confirmed the outbreak, while four are in a nearby health center.