LONDON (Reuters) - Hundreds of staff at British train services London North Eastern Railway and c2c have voted to strike and carry out industrial action short of a strike in a dispute over pay, a transport union said on Wednesday. The result, announced by the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, represents the latest strike action that threatens to disrupt transport services in Britain.

 

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SYDNEY (Reuters) - A wild storm system has moved away from Sydney after pounding Australia’s largest city with four days of torrential rain, satellite images showed on Wednesday, although river waters stayed above danger levels, forcing more evacuations. The year’s third major flooding episode saw more than 85,000 people in New South Wales, most of them in Sydney’s western suburbs, asked to evacuate or warned they might be asked to do so, up from 50,000 on Tuesday, authorities said.

 

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ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — At least 600 inmates escaped in a jailbreak in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, officials said Wednesday, blaming the attack on takfiri rebels. Over 300 escapees have either been recaptured or turned themselves in at police stations, authorities said. The “very determined” rebels attacked the Kuje maximum prison in Abuja on Tuesday night with “very high-grade explosives,” killing one guard on duty, according to Shuaib Belgore, permanent secretary of Nigeria’s Ministry of Interior.

 

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PARIS (AFP) -A Tunisian judge has ordered a freeze on the financial assets of the former speaker of the country’s dissolved parliament, Rached Ghannouchi, former prime minister Hamadi Jebali and several other people. He added that the list of people included Ghannouchi’s son Moadh Ghannouchi and son-in-law Rafik Abdessalem, who was a former foreign minister. “There is an order from the anti-terrorism judge to freeze the bank accounts of those people, the Financial Analysis Committee asked the banks to implement the judicial decision,” said an official on the financial analysis committee, which is headed by central bank governor. No further details about the case were known and Rached and Moadh Ghannouchi and Jebali could not immediately be reached for comment.

 

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LONDON (Al-Jazeera) -At least 47 police officers have been injured in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje during protests against the government’s concessions on ethnic rights as part of EU accession talks, according to news agency Makfax that cited the police. Wednesday’s report said that two of the 47 officers were seriously injured in the Tuesday protests. Eleven protesters were arrested. Nationalist opposition party VMRO-DPMNE had called for the protests, enraged because of concessions to Bulgaria amid the EU accession process.