AT LEAST 19 DEAD IN CENTRAL NEPAL BUS ACCIDENT – POLICE

KATHMANDU: At least 19 people were killed when an overcrowded bus swerved off the road and plunged into a river in central Nepal on Saturday, police said. The bus skidded off the road in Dhading district, 80 kilometers west of capital Kathmandu, early morning and fell into the Trishuli River. “We have reco vered the bodies of 19 people from the place of the accident and number of missing is still unknown as the bus had no record of the total number of passengers,” district police chief Dhruba Raj Raut told Agence France-Presse. Authorities are yet to confirm the cause of the crash, but local media quoted passengers saying that the driver may have been drunk. Police Inspector Barun Bahadur Singh, at the scene of the accident, told Agence France-Presse that the driver was injured in the accident and is thought to have fled after freeing himself from the wreckage of the bus.

MYANMAR DETAINS TURKISH MEDIA REPORTERS FOR FLYING DRONE OVER CAPITAL

YANGON: Two foreign journalists working for Turkish state media have been detained for more than 24 hours in Myanmar for flying a drone over a parliament building in the capital, the government said on Saturday. The incident comes during high tension between Myanmar and Turkey, which has lambasted the Southeast Asian nation for its treatment of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority. Last month Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Myanmar of incubating “Buddhist terror” and carrying out a genocide against the Muslim group. The reporters, Lau Hon Meng from Singapore and Mok Choy Lin from Malaysia, were arrested on Friday in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw while they were on assignment for Turkish state broadcaster TRT. The pair was working with well-known Myanmar journalist Aung Naing Soe, whose house in Yangon was searched by authorities on Friday night, according to local media.

TYPHOON SAOLA BRINGS HEAVY RAIN IN SOUTHERN JAPAN

TOKYO: Typhoon Saola barreled towards Japan’s southernmost Okinawa island chain on Saturday bringing heavy rain as authorities issued a warning for strong winds and landslides. The storm came less than a week after Typhoon Lan left five dead, one missing and scores injured. Saola was moving 60 kilometers (37 miles) southwest of Okinawa’s capital Naha at 11 a.m. (0200 GMT), packing gusts of up to 162 kilometers per hour, Japan’s weather agency said. The storm is set to pass through Okinawa and the small subtropical island chain of Amami, which lies between Okinawa and Kyushu, late Saturday evening and then hit southern Kagoshima prefecture on Sunday morning. Public broadcaster NHK said some rivers in Okinawa are at risk of flooding.

CANADA PAUSES MILITARY ASSISTANCE TO IRAQI TROOPS

OTTAWA: Canadian Special Forces have temporarily suspended military assistance to Iraqi troops due to tensions between the Middle Eastern country’s military and Kurdish fighters, the defense ministry said on Friday (Saturday in Manila). Cooperation will resume “once more clarity exists regarding the inter-relationships of Iraqi security forces, and the key priorities and tasks going forward,” said Dan Le Bouthillier, a spokesman for Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan. Earlier Friday, Iraqi forces paused operations against the Kurds to allow for talks after the two sides—both armed and trained by the US— exchanged heavy artillery fire in the latest flare-up of a crisis sparked by a Kurdish independence vote last month. Canada, which is part of the international coalition fighting the Islamic State group, said that although its special forces were suspending their mission in training and assisting Iraqi forces in the country’s north, its work in other areas continued. That includes supporting the coalition in tactical aviation, intelligence, targeting, command and control, and at a medical facility.