Jordan jails 2 for raping tourists

AMMAN: Jordan’s Criminal Court has convicted two men of raping a pair of British women in a farm near the Israeli border late 2007 and sentenced them to nearly 14 years in jail with hard labor. Authorities withheld the names of the Jordanian defendants and the women, who were students at a Syrian university. They had been visiting Jordan during a religious holiday.

3 more die in Egypt flooding

RAFAH: Three more Egyptians died in flooding in the southern Sinai Desert Wednesday, bringing the toll for three days of unseasonably heavy rains to 10, said a health official. Bedouins angry that the government was downplaying the magnitude of their losses clashed with security forces in South Sinai and injured a senior police officer and two of his men, said Mohammed Fayez, the head of the emergency medical unit in the province.

Vietnam jails four for subversion

VIETNAM: A Vietnamese court on Wednesday sentenced four democracy activists to jail for subversion, drawing fire from Western diplomats who called for their release. Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, an Internet entrepreneur, was given 16 years in jail, activist Nguyen Tien Trung got seven years, Le Thang Long, a colleague of Thuc’s, was handed five years, and US-trained lawyer Le Cong Dinh, the best known of the defendants, also got five years. The case has attracted attention abroad in part because of the involvement of Dinh, a US trained lawyer who had defended democracy activists.

Sri Lanka heading for ‘flawed polls’

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s upcoming presidential polls could be seriously flawed as state officials violated laws governing the conduct of the vote, the country’s independent elections chief has said. Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake was quoted as saying Wednesday that he had stopped issuing directives to the police and other government authorities who disregarded his orders for conducting a free and fair election.

Two Koreas hold 2nd day of talks

SEOUL: North and South Korea held a second day of talks Wednesday about their joint business project despite Pyongyang’s threats last week to break off dialogue with its neighbor. The two sides were holding “a comprehensive discussion” on ways to improve the Kaesong industrial estate just north of the border, said Seoul unification ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-Joo. She said the talks, due to end later Wednesday, had been extended by a few hours to allow more discussions.

— Compiled from agencies