BEIRUT: The Islamic State group on Sunday seized a town in central Syria known as a symbol of religious coexistence in a surprise attack against regime forces, a monitor said.

The militants took control of Al-Qaryatain in the central province of Homs early on Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.

Violent clashes broke out after the militants sneaked in, the Britain-based Observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman said.

Government troops had surrounded the town, where several Christian families are believed to be living, he said.

Al-Qaryatain was home to some 30,000 people before Syria’s war broke out in 2011, 900 of them Christians.

Regime forces recaptured Al-Qaryatain in April 2016 after eight months of militants control.

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In early August 2015, IS abducted 270 Christians from the town, transporting them around 90 kilometres (55 miles) away deep in the Syria desert and locking them up in an underground dungeon. They were freed 25 days later.

The same month, IS destroyed parts of a monastery in the town and reduced a fifth-century mud brick church to rubble using explosives and bulldozers.

73 Syria government fighters killed in IS attacks: monitor

Earlier this week the militants launched an assault on government positions in Syria’s vast Badiya desert, killing at least 128 regime troops.

Syrian troops pushed through the desert, which separates the main cities of the west from the Euphrates Valley this summer, and broke a years-long IS siege on government enclaves in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor last month.

In addition to the Russian-backed government offensive, a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters is battling the group, which is also under attack in neighbouring Iraq.

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COLOMBO: Sri Lankan police said Sunday they have arrested six people in their hunt for a mob led by Buddhist monks who attacked Rohingya refugees last week.

The government of the Buddhist-majority country has accused the monks of behaving like “animals” during Tuesday’s attack on a centre housing Rohingya Muslims including children on the outskirts of Colombo.

“We have identified the monks who led the attack,” an officer involved in the investigation told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“We have deployed three teams to arrest them.”

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Two police officers had to be hospitalised after the attack, in which monks and their supporters threw stones and smashed windows and furniture.

Five men and a woman have already been arrested and a government official said several police officers were also under investigation for failing to prevent the violence.

The refugees had arrived in Sri Lanka five months ago after the navy found them drifting in a boat off the island’s north coast.

Before that, they had been living in India for several years.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar in recent years and while most are in refugee camps in Bangladesh, a sizeable minority have moved to other parts of South Asia.

They have been the target of decades of state-backed persecution and discrimination in mainly Buddhist Myanmar, where many view them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

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Sri Lanka’s extremist Buddhist monks have close links with their ultra-nationalist counterparts in Myanmar. Both have been accused of orchestrating violence against minority Muslims in the two countries.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees expressed alarm over Tuesday’s attack and urged Sri Lankans to show empathy for civilians fleeing persecution and violence.

The 31 Rohingya refugees, including 16 children and seven women, were evacuated by the police and accommodated at a former detention centre in the south of the island for their safety, according to the government.

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WASHINGTON DC: The US Supreme Court on Monday opens its 2017-2018 session, facing thorny issues that include gay and labor rights, voter restrictions and limits on gathering private information.

On many of these issues the Republican administration of President Donald Trump has taken the exact opposite position from that of the previous Democratic administration under Barack Obama.

Unlike in its last session, when the nine-justice court operated with a four-four ideological split with one seat vacant, Trump can now count on Justice Neil Gorsuch, a firm conservative vote who in April took over the position created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

From Trump’s perspective, the most significant case would result in a validation of his decrees limiting immigration, which have faced repeated setbacks in lower courts. But after his administration reworked its decrees, the Supreme Court canceled an October 10 hearing on the matter, though it may return to it later.

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“There is only one prediction that is entirely safe about the upcoming term, and that is it will be momentous,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said recently.

At the age of 84, “RBG,” as she is known, is the doyenne of the court and a reliable liberal vote. Democrats fear that if she retires, the billionaire president will replace her with another conservative, tilting the ultimate US legal body rightward for years.

“For us, this is a ‘we’ll see you in the Supreme Court’ term,” said David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a leading rights group.

“In all five of our cases this term, Donald Trump is on the opposite side. And in three of them, his administration has broken from decades of precedent,” Cole said.

Cole cited a case in the state of Colorado involving a conservative Christian baker who opposes homosexuality and refused to prepare a wedding cake for a gay couple — the most important case on gay rights to reach the top court since gay marriage was legalized in the United States in June 2015.

The ACLU is representing the bride and groom, while the Trump administration supports the baker, who argues that his refusal is based in part on his right to creative freedom.

Another case in which the Trump administration takes the opposite stance from that of Obama concerns a voting case in Ohio, a Midwestern state where the governing Republican Party wants to purge the voter rolls of people who do not regularly vote.

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This would mainly affect poor and minority citizens, groups that historically vote for Democrats.

In another voting case, justices will hear arguments for the first time in 12 years on the way states draw complicated and creative electoral districts to favor the party in power, a process known as “gerrymandering.”

A separate case aims to set the parameters on  authorities’ access to geolocation data for mobile operators.

The case concerns a man sentenced to prison for theft in the Detroit area. Police were able to link him to a series of robberies by following his movements for 127 days through the geolocator data from his smartphone.

In a case concerning organized labor, the court will look at the compulsory union dues that civil servants are sometimes forced to pay.

The matter reached the court last year, but the justices split four-to-four.

With Gorsuch now on the bench, conservatives could win a historic victory in their decades-long war against unions.

Rulings in these cases are expected by the end of June 2018.

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PARIS: An Air France A380 superjumbo carrying more than 500 people made an emergency landing in Canada on Saturday after suffering “serious damage” to one of its engines, with passengers recounting hearing a loud bang followed by violent shaking.

Video and photos posted on social media showed extensive damage to the outer starboard engine, with part of its external cowling apparently sheered away.

The double-decker wide body aircraft carrying 496 passengers and 24 crew had taken off from Paris bound for Los Angeles and was several hours into the flight when the incident occurred.

Passenger Sarah Eamigh told Canadian broadcaster CBC News she heard a “boom” followed by a sudden drop in altitude.

“The cabin started vibrating. Someone screamed, and from there we knew something was wrong,” she said.

“We saw the cabin crew walking through the aisles quickly, and we heard an announcement from the captain that said one of our engines had an explosion.”

The plane was diverted as it passed over Greenland and landed safely at a military airport in Goose Bay, eastern Canada, at 1542 GMT, a spokesman for Air France said.

“All of the 520 people on board were evacuated with no injuries,” the spokesman told AFP.

The cause of the problem was not immediately clear, but David Rehmar, a former aircraft mechanic who was on the flight, told the BBC that he thought a fan failure may have been to blame.

“You heard a loud ‘boom’, and it was the vibration alone that made me think the engine had failed,” he said.

Rehmar said that for a few moments, he thought “we were going to go down”.

Another passenger, John Birkhead, told the New York Times that he and his wife had just stood up to stretch when they heard an explosion.

“We were just stretching and talking, and suddenly there was an enormous bang, and the whole plane shook,” Birkhead, 59, said. “We were lucky we weren’t tossed to the ground.”

Japan Airlines flight makes emergency landing after possible bird strike

Passenger Miguel Amador posted video footage apparently filmed from a window of the plane showing the damaged engine.

“Engine failure halfway over the Atlantic ocean,” he wrote.

Passenger Pamela Adams said everything on the flight had been normal “and suddenly it felt like we had run into a jeep in the middle of 35,000 feet high”, she told CBC News.

She said she was “jostled” and the plane dipped slightly “but the pilots recovered beautifully”.

“There wasn’t the panic that I would’ve expected,” she said, praising the pilots for the way they handled the incident.

The airline said it would fly the affected passengers to Los Angeles aboard two planes on Sunday morning.

While Goose Bay is a military base operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force, it is also a designated standby airport for diverted transatlantic flights.

Air France operates 10 Airbus A380s, the largest passenger planes in the world.

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Their version of the plane uses GP7200 engines, a giant turbofan built by General Electric and Pratt and Whitney of the US.

In 2010, a Qantas A380 was forced to make an emergency landing in Singapore when one of its Rolls-Royce engines failed, causing the airline to ground its fleet of the superjumbos for weeks.

Sales of the mammoth A380 have been sluggish and Airbus has said it will reduce production in 2019 to just eight of the planes.

In 2015 the company produced 27 of them.

Nonetheless, Airbus CEO Tom Enders recently voiced confidence in the future of the plane.

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