Japan’s defense minister said Saturday that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war, drawing criticism from atomic bomb survivors. “I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn’t be helped,” Fumio Kyuma said in a speech at a university in Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo.
Two U.S. soldiers have been charged with the premeditated murder of three Iraqis, the U.S. military announced Saturday. The charges stem from three separate incidents between April and June in the vicinity of Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, the military said in a statement. An investigation was launched after fellow soldiers reported the alleged crimes to military authorities, it said.
A plane carrying Ivory Coast’s prime minister came under heavy gunfire as it landed Friday at an airport in the country’s north, but the leader was not harmed, his spokesmen said. Three other people suffered fatal injuries during a rough landing at Bouake airport, roughly 250 miles from the West African country’s commercial capital Abidjan, two spokesmen for Prime Minister Guillaume Soro said.
An airport inspector foiled a plot to ship 20 pounds of cocaine to Panama when he discovered the drugs stuffed inside sets of false teeth. The boxes of druggy dentures seized Friday at Bogota’s El Dorado Airport contained about $300,000 worth of pure cocaine, Colombian police said in a statement.
China enacted a law Friday meant to improve workers’ rights after the communist government took the unprecedented step of seeking input from foreign companies and the Chinese public. The measure, the biggest change in Chinese labor law in more than a decade, was preceded by intense debates, warnings about potential damage to business and charges from activists that U.S. and other foreign companies were trying to suppress workers’ rights.
The death of a 12-year-old Egyptian girl at the hands of a doctor performing female circumcision has sparked a public outcry and prompted health and religious authorities to ban the practice. The girl, Badour Shaker, died in June while undergoing the procedure in an illegal clinic in the southern town of Maghagh. Her mother, Zeniab Abdel Ghani, told the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper that she paid about $9 to a female physician to perform the procedure.
Mexico announced Thursday it would overhaul training of all state and federal police chiefs as the government seeks international help to fight organized crime. Authorities recently removed the nation’s top federal police officers and are forcing them to prove they will not be corrupted by organized crime. Now, more than 1,000 high-ranking state and federal officers will be required to complete a yearlong course in crisis control, law enforcement techniques and the English language as Mexico aims to work closely with U.S. and European police, said Genaro Garcia Luna, secretary of public safety.
U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in southern Afghanistan left at least 30 people, including women and children, killed or wounded, an official said Saturday. Taliban fighters tried to ambush a joint U.S.-Afghan military convoy in Helmand province’s Gereshk district late Friday before fleeing into a nearby village for cover, said Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief.
