A round-up of today’s other stories in brief
Portuguese budget cuts talks collapse
LISBON – The Portuguese government and the country’s main opposition party broke off talks on the biggest budget cuts since at least the 1970s, threatening passage of the 2011 plan to tame the euro region’s fourth biggest deficit.
“There is no possibility of continuing the negotiation process,” Eduardo Catroga, a former finance minister who represented the opposition Social Democratic Party in the talks, said in Lisbon yesterday. “My function from a technical standpoint no longer makes sense.”
The Social Democrats have opposed tax increases and called for deeper spending cuts. Socialist prime minister José Socrates, lacking a majority, needs the Social Democrats to back the budget or abstain for it to be passed. – (Bloomberg)
65 die at Afghan wedding party
KABUL – A collapsing roof killed 65 people during a wedding celebration in northern Afghanistan, police said yesterday. Forty other people were injured in the tragedy in Baghlan province.
A police spokesman said the house was overloaded and only made of mud bricks.
Most of the dead were women on the top floor, who were celebrating separately from the men. Twelve children were also among the dead.
Houses in rural Afghanistan are typically made out of mud brick and wooden beams. – (AP)
Drugs gang kill 13 in Mexico shooting
MEXICO CITY – A group of suspected drug hitmen shot dead at least 13 people at a car wash in western Mexico yesterday, the third massacre in just a few days.
The gunmen opened fire on the workers in the car wash on the outskirts of the coastal city of Tepic in Nayarit state, killing them instantly, the state attorney general’s office said. The multiple murder is the third since Friday, when gunmen shot and killed 14 people, including a 14-year-old girl, at a party in Ciudad Juarez. – (Reuters)