COTONOU (Dispatches) – Al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM said it killed 70 soldiers in raids on two military posts in north Benin, the biggest death count claimed by militants in the country in over a decade of activity in West Africa, the SITE Intelligence Group said on Saturday. The West African state and its coastal neighbor Togo have suffered a series of attacks in recent years as groups linked to Daesh and Al-Qaeda have expanded their presence beyond the Sahel region to the north. Reuters could not immediately confirm the report independently. Benin’s army spokesman Ebenezer Honfoga did not respond to calls and messages. SITE quoted a statement by JNIM on Thursday saying 70 soldiers were killed in attacks on two military posts in Benin’s northeastern Kandi province in the Alibori department, more than 500 km from the capital Cotonou. U.S. group SITE tracks online content from militant groups.

 

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SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea denounced on Sunday U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent order to ease weapons exports and called the decision “war escalation measures.” “On one hand, the U.S. is pretending to be a ‘mediator’ by recommending dialogue and negotiation, while on the other hand, it is continuously handing over all kinds of weapons of mass destruction to encourage warmongers to further expand and prolong the war,” the Korean Central News Agency said in an unnamed commentary.

 

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BERLIN (AFP) – A large police operation was under way in Germany on Sunday to find one or more shooters who killed two men the day before in the center of the country, police said. The bodies of the two victims, both with gunshot wounds, were found in front of a residential address in Bad Nauheim, a town north of Frankfurt, on Saturday afternoon, Giessen city police said. “A big force deployment” of police from uniformed, plain clothes and special forces branches have fanned out, backed by a helicopter, to find the perpetrator or perpetrators, it said. “The current understanding is that there is no danger for inhabitants or other people,” police said. There was no information yet about the “circumstances, or the motive of the perpetrators,” they said. Police and prosecutors have opened an investigation.

 

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NEW DELHI (Xinhua) – At least 11 people were killed and 11 others injured after a multi-storey residential building collapsed in the Indian national capital territory of Delhi, police said. The building collapsed in Mustafabad area of North East Delhi district in the early hours of Saturday. Following the building collapse, teams of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), fire services, police and locals carried out rescue efforts at the spot to pull out survivors and the dead from the debris. A closed-circuit television camera footage revealed that the building collapsed at 2:39 a.m. (local time) on Saturday. Reports said 22 occupants who were asleep at that time inside the building got trapped following its collapse. Officials of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi told local media the building was around 20 years old.

 

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ZHEZKAZGAN (AFP) – NASA’s oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit became a septuagenarian while hurtling towards the Earth in a spacecraft to wrap up a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS). A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, the day of Pettit’s milestone birthday. “Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan,” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said. Spending 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission. It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit throughout his 29-year career. The trio touched down in a remote area southeast of Kazakhstan after undocking from the space station just over three hours earlier.

 

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BISHKEK (AFP) – Kyrgyzstan is getting rid of its Soviet-inspired national anthem and has launched an unprecedented public contest to find an alternative. The mountainous Central Asian country adopted a new anthem in 1992 after independence from the USSR but it is largely based on the Soviet-era one. The government says the anthem fails to accurately represent the young nation descending from the ancient history of the nomadic Kyrgyz people. The Kyrgyz were incorporated into first then Tsarist and then the Soviet empires and the country still retains a strong Russian influence. “Winning this competition would be a huge success,” said Balasaguyn Musayev, a 36-year-old composer and one of hundreds who have submitted entries for a new national anthem. Speaking during a rehearsal at the music conservatory in the capital Bishkek, Musayev said it took him a month to find inspiration and then he “wrote the music in two days”. A poet friend wrote the text. “The new anthem must be better than the previous one in every way. Otherwise people will wonder why we changed it,” Musayev told AFP.