NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
_1 Niger violence: Authorities in Niger say unknown assailants have killed 13 soldiers in the West African country. Saturday’s attack occurred in the town of Ayorou near the border with Mali, according to a government communique. This is the latest unrest to hit Niger, where four U.S. service members were recently killed in an ambush by extremists. The country has suffered attacks not only from the local al Qaeda affiliate but also from a relatively new group calling itself Islamic State in the Sahel. That group is believed to have attacked the Americans and left four soldiers from Niger dead.
_2 Afghan attacks: Three rockets were fired into Kabul’s fortified Green Zone on Saturday, where two of them exploded near the NATO compound housing U.S. military personnel and other foreign forces. A few hours later, a suicide bomber attacked a busload of military cadets, killing 14 of them, by detonating explosives near the entrance gate of the Marshal Fahim Military Academy, about seven miles from the NATO complex. The attacks on the NATO complex caused no injuries or damage to the compound, said Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for the U.S.-led NATO effort. No culprits have been identified. This week has been among the deadliest in Afghanistan this year, with more than 150 people killed during suicide bomb attacks in various provinces. Most of those attacks targeted Afghan police or military facilities.
_3 Czech elections: The centrist ANO movement led by populist billionaire Andrej Babis decisively won the Czech Republic’s parliamentary election Saturday in a vote that shifted the country to the right and paved the way for the euroskeptic billionaire to become its next prime minister. With virtually all votes counted, the Czech Statistics Office said Saturday that ANO won in a landslide with 29.7 percent of the vote. Many Czechs see Babis as a maverick outsider with the business acumen to shake up the system. For some, he is the Czech answer to President Trump.
_4 Reporter killed: Malta’s government is offering a $1.18 million reward and full protection for anyone with information on who killed an investigative reporter with a car bomb. The government statement Saturday called the Oct. 16 car bomb slaying of Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose reporting on corruption targeted the prime minister and other top figures on the southern Mediterranean island, a “case of extraordinary importance.” It said it is offering the “unprecedented” reward to whoever comes forward with information leading to the identification of those responsible for the bombing, which stunned the tiny EU island nation.
_5 Poet’s death: A team of international scientists said Friday that Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda did not die of cancer or malnutrition, rejecting the official cause of death but not laying to rest one of the great mysteries of post-coup Chile. While saying what the poet and Communist Party politician did not die of, the forensic experts didn’t say what he did die of or end the debate over whether he was murdered by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship shortly after the country’s 1973 military takeover. The poet, who was 69 years old and suffering from prostate cancer, died in Chile’s post-coup chaos. The official version was that he died of cachexia, or weakness and wasting of the body due to chronic illness — in this case cancer.