Sudan
Khartoum (AFP) – About 1,000 people were arrested and hundreds hurt, many by tear gas, during anti-regime protests in Sudan on Friday, an activist group said on Saturday’s anniversary of President Omar Al-Bashir’s coup. The information minister called the protesters “rioters” who threaten the country’s stability. The group’s figures indicate a dramatic rise in the number of arrests on Friday, the 14th day of anti-regime demonstrations sparked by inflation. Police said “some of the rioters” were arrested and would be brought to trial after “small groups” demonstrated in Khartoum and elsewhere.
IsraelJerusalem (AFP) – The body of Israel’s former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who died on Saturday aged 96, will lie in state at the country’s parliament before his burial on Monday, a Knesset spokesman said on Sunday. Ministers gathered for Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting stood in silence for one minute in tribute to the late leader who, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was a member of the right-wing Likud party. A fighter in a far-right pre-state underground militia, Shamir was an agent of the Mossad spy agency before becoming Israel’s prime minister from 1983 to 1984 and then from 1986 to 1992, also serving terms as speaker of the Knesset and foreign minister. He retired from political life in 1996 and in his later years suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, living in a retirement home north of Tel Aviv until his death.
LibyaTripoli (AFP) – Renewed tribal clashes in the Libyan city of Kufra have claimed at least 47 lives and left more than 100 others wounded in three days, local leaders and a medic told AFP on Saturday. “Thirty-two have been killed this week in the two Toubou residential areas,” a medic treating Toubou casualties in Kufra told AFP. “The number of wounded exceeds 100. Women and children make up more than half of the injured, with the majority of them hurt by mortar fire,” added doctor Taher Wehli. The medic said his clinic had documented eight deaths on Saturday alone. In February, tribal clashes in Kufra left more than 100 people dead and displaced half the population, according to UN figures.
LebanonBEIRUT (AFP) – The Syrian opposition gave a largely negative response on Sunday to the transition deal hammered out by world powers aimed at resolving the bloody conflict, with a former top leader branding it a “farce.” The ex-head of the umbrella Syrian National Council, Burhan Ghalioun, described as a “mockery” the notion that Syrians should negotiate with “their executioner, who has not stopped killing, torturing… and raping women for 16 months.” The Geneva meeting agreed on a plan for a transitio
n in Syria that could include current regime members, but the West ruled out any role for President Bashar-al Assad in a new unity government.Yemen
SANAA (AFP) – A Yemeni soldier and an Al-Qaeda militant were killed Sunday as jihadists tried to raid a village in the southern province of Daleh, the defence ministry’s website reported. Security forces “foiled an attempt by a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists to infiltrate into … the village of Shueib in Daleh province early on Sunday,” Daleh security chief, General Ali Al-Amri, was quoted as saying on 26sept.net, website of the defence ministry.
The forces, backed by local militiamen, besieged the group and demanded they surrender, he said. “But they refused and opened fire wounding one citizen and sparking clashes that killed the group’s leader and wounded two others,” said Amri, adding that nine militants were also arrested.
