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World in Brief: 21st April 2014

Short stories from around the world.

EGYPT: Progressive politician Hamdeen Sabbahi submitted the documents required to run in next month’s presidential election on Saturday.

He is likely to be the only rival to former army chief Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

Sabbahi is currently Field Marshal Sissi’s sole challenger after lawyer Mortada Mansour announced he was withdrawing his candidacy.

IRAQ: Attacks including a suicide bombing at a university in north Baghdad killed at least nine people today.

Police said a suicide bomber entered the Imam Kadhim University before setting off explosives, while another bomber and a gunman were killed by security forces.

Twenty-nine people died on Saturday when security forces retook the Al-Hamira area south of Ramadi from militants.

ARGENTINA: Around 100 suspects were arrested and 85 weapons seized when police conducted dozens of simultaneous raids in Buenos Aires province on Saturday.

The massive police operation in the southern edge of the capital is part of a campaign against a spike in violent crime and vigilante action against it.

The operation also netted a reported 12 cars and 29 motorcycles, police body armour, drugs and shotguns of the type carried by Argentinian security forces.

ALGERIA: Police and military officials said today that Islamist insurgents ambushed a military bus in the central Kabylie mountains.

A military official in Algiers put the toll at 10 dead with eight wounded, but a police officer in the region said at least 14 died.

The soldiers were returning from an operation when they were ambushed early this morning.

Algeria fought a 10-year civil war against Islamists in the 1990s. Now they are largely confined to isolated regions such as the Kabylie mountains.

POLAND: Some 200 members of the Jewish community and Warsaw residents have observed the 71st anniversary of the city ghetto’s ill-fated uprising against German nazi forces.

Officials laid wreaths and the group said prayers at the monument to the Ghetto Heroes today.

They marched to the former Umschlag Platz, where in 1943 the nazis loaded ghetto residents onto cattle wagons to take them to the Treblinka camp.

About half a million Warsaw Jews died there.

GUYANA: The government said today that it has scheduled the first hearings for an in-depth investigation into the 1980 assassination of local historian and black activist Walter Rodney.

The South American country’s police chief and its army chief of staff are scheduled to testify at a hearing which is starting tomorrow.

Rodney was involved in the Black Power movement in the US and the Caribbean.

BRAZIL: Angry residents of a city near Rio de Janeiro have torched four buses in protest after a man was killed during a firefight between police and drug traffickers.

Protesters in Niteroi blamed police for the killing of 21-year old Anderson Santos Silva, who died while trying to protect his mother and nine-year-old sister from bullets.

Military police have denied any wrongdoing.

 

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