A roadside bomb ripped through a bus carrying military personnel and their families in Turkey’s largest city of Istanbul on Tuesday, killing four people, after the Army stepped up operations against Kurdish rebels.
The remote controlled bomb was detonated near a military housing complex in the district of Halkali. Three of those killed were sergeants and the fourth victim was a 17-year-old girl, the state Anatolian news agency said. The blast wounded nearly a dozen people and two were in serious condition, Istanbul’s provincial governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu said. “This is a terrorist attack, and the aim of the attack is clear — to create divisions, tensions and despair,” he told reporters.
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‘Li Peng diary halted due to moral issues’
Hong Kong, June 22: The publisher of former Chinese Premier Li Peng’s purported diary said on Tuesday that it was moral rather than legal concerns that drove him to halt the release of the highly anticipated book. Bao Pu, head of Hong Kong-based New Century Press, said he decided to stop the printing of The Tiananmen Diary of Li Peng on June 18 after he was approached a number of times by people whom he refused to identify.
Excerpts of the book shed rare light on the decisions leading up to the crackdown on student-led protests on Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989. He said “all kinds of players arrived to the scene” after the South China Morning Post found and published excerpts of the book on June 4.
—AFP
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France burqa ban goes to House July 6
Paris, June 22: French legislators will begin on July 6 to debate a government proposal to ban the Muslim full-face veil from public spaces, a minister said on Tuesday.
The lower house National Assembly will read the bill before it passes to the Senate in September and it could be adopted into law soon after, said Henri de Raincourt, the minister for parliamentary relations.
The bill by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government proposes to ban anyone in France from wearing a garment “designed to hide the face” — a move interpreted as targeting Muslim women who wear veils such as the niqab or burqa.
Those who break the law would be fined $180 or sent on a course to learn the values of French citizenship.
—AFP