NEWS OF THE DAY
1 Hospital attack: Officials on Wednesday raised the death toll from a militant attack on a maternity hospital in Kabul to 24, including mothers, nurses and two babies. A day after the shooting rampage, 20 infants were under medical observation, lying swaddled in blankets in hospital cribs. Militants had stormed the hospital on Tuesday, setting off an hourslong shootout with police. As the gunfight raged, Afghan security forces carried out babies and frantic mothers. The clinic, in a mostly Shiite neighborhood in Afghanistan’s capital, is supported by international aid group Doctors Without Borders. The Interior Ministry initially said Tuesday that 16 people were killed. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack
2 Kashmir shooting: Indian soldiers fatally shot a young man at a checkpoint in the Himalayan region of Kashmir on Wednesday, residents and officials said, triggering antiIndia protests and clashes in the disputed region. Authorities ordered an investigation that rights groups say rarely yield any concrete results and are often aimed at calming public anger. India and Pakistan each administer part of Kashmir, but both claim the region in its entirety. About 70,000 people have been killed in the uprising and the ensuing Indian military crackdown.
3 Spying charge: German prosecutors have charged an Indian man with spying on the Sikh community and Kashmir activists in Germany for his country’s intelligence service for more than two years. The federal prosecutor’s office said Wednesday that espionage charges against the suspect, identified only as Balvir S. in line with German privacy rules, were filed in Frankfurt. He is accused of agreeing to pass information on Sikhs and the “Kashmir movement” and their relatives to an employee of India’s Research & Analysis Wing in or before January 2015. According to prosecutors, the suspect was in regular telephone and personal contact with the Germanybased intelligence officer and passed on information “in numerous cases” until December 2017.
4 Dictatorship fugitive: Brazil’s federal police agency says it has arrested a former Argentine navy officer accused of dictatorshipera crimes, including crimes against humanity and kidnapping. Argentina’s foreign ministry confirmed his identity as Gonzalo Sanchez, 69, also known as “Chispa.” He was apprehended Monday on Rio de Janeiro state’s southern coast, and is suspected of forming part of a group that assassinated students, union members and opposition politicians, according to a federal police statement. Their bodies were thrown from planes on socalled “death flights.” Sanchez was previously arrested in 2013, and a judge ordered house arrest. In 2019, the Supreme Court authorized his extradition. Sanchez has been on the run from Argentina’s justice system since 2005.
5 Chinese identity: About twothirds of Taiwanese don’t identify as Chinese, according to a survey released this week that highlights the challenge China would face in bringing the selfgoverning island under its control. The U.S.based Pew Research Center found that 66% view themselves as Taiwanese, 28% as both Taiwanese and Chinese and 4% as just Chinese. The results are consistent with other polls showing that residents increasingly identify only as Taiwanese, Pew said. Today’s Taiwan was born of a civil war in China that brought Mao Zedong’s Communists to power on the mainland in 1949. The rival Nationalists, led by Chiang Kaishek, fled to Taiwan, an island about 100 miles off China’s coast. Seventy years later, 83% of respondents under 30 say they don’t consider themselves Chinese.
Chronicle News Services