2 dozen injured in bombings in eastern Ukraine

MOSCOW—SEVERAL explosions rocked an industrial city in eastern Ukraine on Friday, wounding more than two dozen people in what officials described as a coordinated terrorist attack. The region has had occasional incidents of violence in recent years, and the attacks were timed just weeks before the country welcomes the Euro 2012 soccer tournament. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but because the stricken city, Dnipropetrovsk, is the hometown of the jailed former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s often warring political factions immediately lobbed accusations at one another. Nikolai Tomenko, a member of Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party, said in a statement that the government might have orchestrated the attacks to “deflect the attention of the world and Ukraine from Yulia Tymoshenko’s case.” Tymoshenko is in the first year of a seven-year prison sentence on charges of abusing her authority as prime minister, but remains a potent political force. Paris—romania’s government fell on Friday in a no-confidence vote just two months after taking office, the latest government in Europe to crumble amid disputes over unpopular austerity measures and declining growth rates. Some 235 lawmakers voted against the center-right government of Prime Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, four more votes than needed, plunging the country into crisis and raising the prospect of months of political and economic uncertainty. The International Monetary Fund, which had been reviewing a precautionary loan for Romania of $6.6 billion, said on Friday that it would halt the review pending the formation of a new government. Governments have been collapsing across Europe amid calls by Germany and others for tough austerity to help restore confidence in the eurozone, even as some critics complain that aggressive cuts are undermining economic growth and spurring Europeans to protest. FEWER ILLEGAL immigrants stopped by police for minor traffic violations would be held for deportation under changes announced on Friday to a federal fingerprinting program, Department of Homeland Security officials said. The policy change on how federal agents will handle illegal immigrants arrested by state and local police for offenses such as driving without a license came in the department’s response to a report by a task force on the federal program. One of the task force’s central recommendations was that the program, called Secure Communities, should avoid deportations of traffic violators. The sharply critical task force report, issued in September, argued that such deportations were inconsistent with the department’s stated priorities of removing foreigners with serious criminal records. The increase in deportations of minor offenders under Secure Communities, the task force concluded, was undermining vital ties of trust between local police and immigrant neighborhoods.