NEWS OF THE DAY
_1 Independence declaration: Spain’s constitutional court on Thursday suspended a session of the Catalan regional parliament to preempt separatist lawmakers from approving a unilateral declaration of independence. The court’s decision is a further escalation in the territorial conflict over Catalonia, which held an independence referendum Sunday that Spanish courts declared illegal and suspended. The latest move by the court is unlikely to resolve the dispute, Spain’s worst constitutional crisis since it embraced democracy in the 1970s.
_2 Murder trial: Prosecutors presented the first evidence Thursday linking the banned VX nerve agent to two women accused of killing the estranged half brother of North Korea’s leader at a busy Kuala Lumpur airport terminal. In the trial at Malaysia’s High Court, Siti Aisyah of Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam have pleaded not guilty in the Feb. 13 murder of Kim Jong Nam. They are accused of smearing VX on his face, but the defense says the women thought they were playing a harmless prank for a hidden-camera TV show and had been hoodwinked by men suspected of being North Korean agents. Dr. Raja Subramaniam, the eighth witness and the only one to testify Thursday, said he found traces of VX on the two suspects.
_3 Pakistan bombing: A suicide bomber struck a Shiite shrine packed with worshipers in a remote village in southwestern Pakistan on Thursday, killing 16 people and wounding 30 in an apparent sectarian attack, a provincial government spokesman said. The attacker detonated his explosives vest when he was stopped for a routine search by a police officer guarding the shrine in the village of Jhal Masgi, about 240 miles east of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province. Though no one claimed responsibility for the bombing, Sunni extremists have carried out many such attacks in the past, targeting minority Shiite Muslims in the country. Sunni extremists perceive Shiites as apostates who should be killed.
_4 Critical pope: Pope Francis denounced how new technologies are making it easier for people to change gender, saying this “utopia of the neutral” risks the creation of new life. Francis made the comments Thursday to the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican’s bioethics advisory board, taking up his criticism of so-called gender theory and the idea that people can choose their sex. The academy under the previous two popes represented the leading, hard-line voice of the Catholic Church on sexual ethics, morality and culture war issues such as abortion and euthanasia. Francis has revamped it to broaden its scope to better reflect his wholistic view of human life in concert with creation. _5 Royal mourning: Tens of thousands of Thai mourners have been rushing to Bangkok’s Grand Palace to pay their respects to the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, as a period of nearly a year for his body to lie in state ends ahead of his cremation on Oct. 26. Since Bhumibol’s death last Oct. 13 at age 88, more than 12 million people have visited the golden Dusit Maha Prasat Throne Hall, where the late monarch’s coffin is kept behind a symbolic royal urn. The hall is to be closed to visitors at midnight Thursday. The throne hall has been kept open 24 hours a day since last Saturday to accommodate the high number of last-minute mourners. Officials said the palace received over 96,000 visitors Wednesday, a record number for one day.