News in Brief

Date: 06 May 2018 - 20:25

News ID: ۵۲۵۹۵

WASHINGTON (AFP) -- Senator John McCain, 81 and battling brain cancer, has made clear he does not want President Donald Trump to attend his funeral, U.S. media reported Saturday.
McCain, a Vietnam war vet and respected senator from Arizona who has had a turbulent relationship with Trump, instead wants Vice President Mike Pence to represent the White House, The New York Times and NBC News said, quoting people close to McCain.
McCain is also using a new book and documentary to express regret about not having selected former Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2008 against Barack Obama and instead going with populist Sarah Palin, the Times said.
McCain has been fighting an aggressive form of brain cancer for more than a year.
He is currently back in Arizona, recovering from surgery for an intestinal infection.
McCain and Trump have had a rough relationship, particularly during the 2016 presidential primary, when Trump said McCain -- a POW for years in Vietnam -- was not really a war hero because he was captured.

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JARAK, Serbia (AP) -- Serbian police have prevented a Serbian far-right leader convicted of war crimes from returning to an ethnically-mixed northern village where he spurred ethnic hatred during the 1990s' Balkan war.
Dozens of policemen sealed off Hrtkovci on Sunday, blocking Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj and his supporters from reaching the village and rallying there.
The Radicals briefly gathered by the police cordons before dispersing. A squabble was reported with some liberal protesters who came to denounce Seselj.
The UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia last month sentenced Seselj to ten years in prison over his 1992 speech in Hrtkovci that resulted in the deportations of dozens of ethnic Croats from the village.
Seselj remains free because he served his sentence while in custody during the trial.

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KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (AFP) -- Six Indian engineers working on a power plant project in northern Afghanistan were kidnapped along with their Afghan driver Sunday, Afghan officials said.
Gunmen snatched the seven from a vehicle on the outskirts of Baghlan provincial capital Pule-Khumri, police spokesman Zabi Shuja told AFP.
Provincial council chairman Mohammad Safdar Mohseni said the group had been travelling in a largely Taliban-controlled area when they were abducted after ignoring warnings to take a police escort.
Indian external affairs spokesman Raveesh Kumar confirmed the abduction of Indian nationals, but did not say how many were taken or what they were doing in Baghlan.
Baghlan governor Abdul Hai Nemati told Tolo TV that the Taliban had kidnapped the group. But there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Kidnapping of Afghans and foreigners is common in Afghanistan where swathes of the country are infested with militant groups or criminal gangs.

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BERLIN (Reuters) -- Support for Germany's Social Democrats (SPD), the country's oldest party, has slumped to half that of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives just two weeks after the left-leaning party elected a new leader, a poll showed on Sunday.
The SPD suffered its worst showing in last September's national election since Germany became a republic in 1949, and only reluctantly agreed to go into coalition with Merkel again in March after a divisive internal debate.
Two weeks ago, the SPD elected Andrea Nahles as their first female leader, hoping she could reinvigorate the party.
Nahles has her work cut out.
The survey by pollster Emnid for the Bild am Sonntag weekly showed support for the SPD dropping one percentage point to 17%.
Support for Merkel's conservative bloc - her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU) - rose by two points to 34%.

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CAIRO (AFP) -- Egypt's antiquities ministry said Sunday that tests had debunked a theory that there are hidden chambers next to the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.
Experts used ground penetrating radar (GPR) which provided "conclusive evidence of the non-existence of hidden chambers adjacent to or inside Tutankhamun's tomb," the ministry said in a statement.
More details will be announced in a speech later in the day by the head of an Italian scientific team, Francesco Porcelli, of the Polytechnic University in Turin, the statement said.
It said Porcelli had submitted a report that "concluded, with a very high degree of confidence... the hypothesis concerning the existence of hidden chambers or corridors adjacent to Tutankhamun's tomb is not supported by GPR data."
Previous scans had suggested the possibility of hidden chambers, although experts disagreed on the results.

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MOSCOW (AP) -- Alexei Navalny, the leader of protests against President Vladimir Putin that resulted in the arrests of more than 1,500 demonstrators across Russia, says he has been released from detention but faces two charges.
Navalny said Sunday on Twitter that he had been released after being arrested on Moscow's Pushkin Square on Saturday. He said he faces charges of organizing an unauthorized meeting and of resisting police. Each of those charges can carry a jail sentence of 15 days.
OND-Info, an organization that monitors Russian political arrests, said at least 1,575 people were arrested in demonstrations in 26 cities across Russia protesting Putin's upcoming inauguration Monday for a new term. It was not clear Sunday how many remained in custody.
Amnesty International called the arrests and beatings of some Russian protesters "outrageous."