CHINA: A stone arch bridge being illegally built in a southern village collapsed yesterday afternoon, killing 11 people and injuring several others.

Rescuers pulled out 26 people, mostly construction workers, after the bridge came down in Liangkengkou village in Guangdong province.

Five of them were confirmed dead at the scene.

Eight others were seriously injured, six of whom died later in hospital.

SLOVENIA: Prime Minister Alenka Bratusek announced her resignation yesterday and called for early parliamentary elections.

Ms Bratusek stepped down after losing the leadership of her Positive Slovenia party to Ljubljana Mayor Zoran Jankovic.

Bad bank loans are at the centre of a financial crisis in the small eurozone nation which was once puffed as a model of eastern European transition from centralised economy to free market.

AFGHANISTAN: Authorities are trying to help 700 families who had to flee their homes after a landslide buried a large swathe of Abi Barik village in Badakhshan province on Friday.

Minister for Rural Rehabilitation Wais Ahmad Barmak said that all the families had been evacuated from their homes due to the threat of more landslides.

But several thousand were still thought to be missing

President Hamid Karzai designated yesterday a national day of mourning for the 250 people known to have died in the village.

SYRIA: The Supreme Constitutional Court ruled today that President Bashar Assad and two other candidates can contest coming June presidential elections.

Twenty-four candidates submitted bids to run in the June 3 election, but court spokesman Majid Khadra announced that only a trio had met election law requirements.

President Assad, who is seeking a third seven-year term, will face Damascus MP Hassan bin Abdullah al-Nouri and Aleppo MP Maher Abdul-Hafiz Hajjar.

INDIA: A firework factory blaze near Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh state killed 15 workers and seriously burned another four yesterday.

The workers were making firecrackers when the fire started.

The four workers who were injured suffered burns over 70 to 90 per cent of their bodies and were battling for their lives in hospital.

BRAZIL: Police said today that at least 1,000 people were building shacks on occupied land near the stadium that will host the World Cup’s June 12 opening match.

The Sao Paulo police department said that the land is less than two miles from Sao Paulo’s Itaquerao Stadium.

A spokesman said the Saturday morning occupation was peaceful and evictions were not planned.

He added that he didn’t know why the Homeless Workers Movement had launched the occupation.

SYRIA: Heavy fighting between rival Islamic rebel groups in the east has killed 62 fighters and forced over 60,000 locals to flee their homes over several days of violence.

Rebels from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the Nusra Front have fought each other for months over territory captured from President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Yesterday’s rebel infighting took place around three villages in Deir el-Zour province near the Iraqi border.

ISRAEL: Police were mobbed yesterday night by around 100 extremist settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Officers arrived at the Yitzhar settlement to search the house of a couple suspected of involvement in an attack on a mosque in Umm al-Fahm, in northern Israel, in which racist graffiti was written on walls and the front door was set alight.

Four Yitzhar settlers, including the couple, were arrested last week in connection with the attack.