freeze
the assets of 19 Syrian officials.
The Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said a small bomb blast in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad several days ago may have been an attempt to
assassinate
him. He said that preliminary information indicated he was the target. The BBC's Karin Tobbe in Baghdad says the foiled attack has come at an awkward time for the authorities.
Prime Minister Maliki tried very hard to downplay the significance of this attack, and he assured many times that shouldn't be considered as a sign of weakness of the security forces, but it's definitely embarrassing for Prime Minister Maliki and for the Iraqi authorities who have been saying that the country is
under full control of
the security forces.
The Ministry of Defence in Britain has confirmed that a British soldier has been dismissed and jailed for stabbing a 10-year-old Afghan boy.
In a previously unpublicised conviction, the soldier, Daniel Crook, was
court-martialled
and jailed for 18 months. The
court-martial
, which sat last June, heard that Crook had drunk a considerable amount of vodka the night before the unprovoked attack in Helmand province.
Officials in Germany are preparing to evacuate more than 45,000 people from the city of Koblenz as experts
defuse
a massive Second World War bomb discovered in the River Rhine. Nearly half the city's population will be forced to move to a safe distance before the delicate operation begins.