10 dead, 15 wounded in stabbings in western Canada, police say
REGINA, Saskatchewan — A series of stabbings in two communities in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan left 10 people dead and 15 wounded, authorities said Sunday. Police are looking for two suspects.
The stabbings took place in multiple locations on the James Smith Cree Nation and in the village of Weldon, northeast of Saskatoon, police said.
Rhonda Blackmore, the assistant commissioner of the RCMP Saskatchewan, said some of the victims appear to have been targeted by the suspects but others appear to have been attacked at random. She couldn’t provide a motive.
“It is horrific what has occurred in our province today,” Blackmore said.
She said there are 13 crime scenes where either deceased or injured people were found.
The search for suspects was carried out as fans descended in Saskatchewan’s capital city of Regina for a sold-out Canadian Football League game. Police said the last information they had from the public was that the suspects were sighted in Regina around lunchtime
The Regina Police Service said in a news release that with the help of Mounties, it was working on several fronts to locate and arrest the suspects and had deployed additional resources for public safety throughout the city. The alert first issued by Melfort, Saskatchewan RCMP about 7 a.m. was extended hours later to cover Manitoba and Alberta, as the two suspects remained at large.
Gazans executed: Gaza’s Hamas authorities Sunday executed five Palestinian men convicted in separate cases of murder and alleged collaboration with Israel.
The Interior Ministry said the executions meant “to achieve public deterrence and security,” but rights groups in the past have questioned fair-trial standards in the military and civilian courts of the Islamic militant group.
Two of the men, both members of the Palestinian security forces, were killed by firing squad, and the other three were hanged at a security site in Gaza City.
The executions were the first since Hamas executed three Gazans after a hasty trial in the killing of a leader of the group in 2017.
Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 after fierce clashes with forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. It has issued 180 death sentences and followed through on 33 of them “without the ratification of the Palestinian President in violation of Palestinian law,” according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
Mideast shooting: Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a bus carrying a group of Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, wounding five soldiers, one of them seriously, as well as the civilian bus driver, the Israeli military said.
The Israeli military said three attackers traveling in a pickup carried out the attack. It said they passed the bus, threw explosives at it and then blocked it before opening fire with automatic weapons. Soldiers on board then returned fire, the military said.
The truck fled but then burst into flames. Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, a military spokesman, said two of the attackers were captured and
taken to an Israeli hospital with serious burns. The third attacker remains on the run. The cause of the fire was unclear, though Hecht said it might have been a result of the flammable materials the attackers were carrying.
Hecht said the incident was “quite irregular,” both in its brazenness and because it took place in the Jordan Valley, a normally quiet part of the West Bank.
He said that although the bus was carrying new recruits, it was a civilian vehicle, and it was not clear whether the attackers were aware there were soldiers onboard.
Journalist killed: A Las Vegas investigative reporter was stabbed to death outside his home, and police are looking for a suspect, authorities said.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers found journalist Jeff German dead with stab wounds around 10:30 a.m. Saturday after
authorities received a 911 call, reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
It appears German, 69, was in an altercation with another person that led to the stabbing, which is believed to be an isolated incident, police said.
“We believe the altercation took place outside of the home,” said Capt. Dori Koren, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department spokesman. “We do have some leads. We are pursuing a suspect, but the suspect is outstanding.”
Glenn Cook, the Review-Journal’s executive editor, said German had not communicated any concerns about his personal safety or any threats made against him to anyone in the newspaper’s leadership.
Pakistan flooding: Pakistani engineers cut into an embankment for one of the country’s largest lakes on Sunday to release rising waters in the hopes of saving a nearby city and town
from flooding as officials predicted more monsoon rain was on the way for the country’s already devastated south.
While officials hope the cut in the sides of Lake Manchar will protect about 500,000 people who live in the city of Sehwan and the town of Bhan Saeedabad, villages that are home to 150,000 people are in the path of the diverted waters. The hometown of Sindh province’s chief minister was among the affected villages, whose residents were warned to evacuate ahead of time, according to the provincial information minister.
More than 1,300 have died and millions have lost their homes in flooding caused by unusually heavy monsoon rains in Pakistan this year that many experts have blamed on climate change. In response to the unfolding disaster, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last week called on the world to stop “sleepwalking”
through the crisis. He plans to visit flood-hit areas on Friday.
China threatened over the weekend to take countermeasures after the Biden administration approved the sale of more than $1.1 billion worth of arms to Taiwan.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said the sale of military equipment to Taiwan, designed to repel a seaborne invasion from China, would “severely jeopardize China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
In a series of messages posted to Twitter on Saturday, Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson, also called on the United States to “immediately revoke” the decision to approve the arms sale, announced Friday after the Biden administration formally notified Congress. It will still need approval by Congress, which is considered likely.