World Digest: Sept. 26, 2014

HONG KONG

Clashes with police at pro-democracy rally

Protesters and police clashed at a student pro-democracy rally outside the government’s headquarters in central Hong Kong, leaving some people injured.

Protesters broke through barricades and scaled a fence, getting into an area known as Civic Square, where some remained early Saturday, surrounded by police officers. The police used pepper spray, Radio Television Hong Kong reported.

The violence marks an escalation in tensions as activists try to pressure China to allow a more open election for Hong Kong’s top official post in 2017. The rally that began Friday was held by students who boycotted classes this week, and was one of a series of protests ahead of a planned mass sit-in in the central business district.

Hundreds of activists chanted “Reclaim Civic Square, reclaim the Hong Kong people’s future” and “Release the students” after chaotic scenes that saw some carried away for medical treatment. Hong Kong Cable TV said seven were injured. A policeman appeared to be hurt.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has said that protesters and opposition lawmakers run the risk of China canceling the popular election and that people should be “pragmatic” about the pace of reforms.

— Bloomberg News

NIGERIA

Freed schoolgirl returns home

The first of Nigeria’s kidnapped “Chibok girls” to make it home after being released by her Islamist captors spent a tortured night, tossing and turning and screaming, “They will kill me! They will kill me!”

So says the Rev. Enoch Mark, who stayed up through Thursday night with the woman.

She is the first of 219 girls abducted from the village of Chibok and held for more than five months to be released and find her way home.

About 276 female students were abducted by Islamist Boko Haram fighters early on April 15 from the Government Secondary School. Fifty-seven escaped that night or the following day.

The abduction grabbed people’s sympathy and inspired a worldwide campaign for the girls’ freedom.

— Associated Press

GERMANY

Man arrested after long stay in Syria

German authorities say they have arrested a man who returned in August from a long stay in Syria and says he spent time there with the extremist Islamic State group.

Police and prosecutors said Friday that the 21-year-old from Muelheim an der Ruhr in western Germany, who wasn’t identified in line with German privacy rules, was arrested on suspicion of preparing acts of violence.

Authorities say the man was suspended from a vocational college early this year after showing up with a Muslim prayer rug and attempting to “proselytize” among fellow students.

He was put under observation after he returned from Syria. Prosecutors say officials searched his apartment and arrested him Wednesday after noticing “peculiar behavior.” They didn’t elaborate.

— Associated Press

Hague prosecutors demand life for Karadzic: Prosecutors at a U.N. court in The Hague have called for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to be sentenced to life in prison for his alleged crimes, including the massacre of more than 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica and the shelling of Sarajevo. Karadzic was leader of Republika Srpska, an ethnically Serb breakaway state carved out of multiethnic Bosnia, and prosecutors accuse him of having directed a campaign to drive ethnic Croats and Bosnian Muslims out of the country during the three-year Bosnian war, which cost as many as 100,000 lives. Karadzic insists he is innocent.

Russians hand in Western T-shirts in patriotic drive: Looking to put a patriotic spin on international sanctions over Ukraine, a group is touring Moscow to urge passersby to swap their Western-branded T-shirts for homegrown tops sporting pro-Russian slogans. “Sanctions? Don’t make my Iskanders

laugh,” reads one T-shirt, referring to a Russian missile system. “The Topol is not afraid of sanctions,” says another, vaunting the power of a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile.