Floods, landslides kill 16, injure 360

BEIJING - Flash floods and landslides unleashed by heavy rains have killed 16 people in one of the areas hit hardest by the massive May earthquake in China's Sichuan province, the local government said yesterday. About 20,000 people affected by the floods were moved to safer places and given food and water, the city's Communist Party propaganda department said in a statement. The flooding and landslides since Wednesday also have left 48 people missing and 360 people injured in Sichuan's Mianyang city, the agency said. More than 42,000 houses have been reported destroyed. (AP)

ANKARA - Turkish warplanes attacked 16 Kurdish rebel targets in a cross-border raid in northern Iraq, a military spokesman said yesterday. The strikes late Thursday targeted rebel positions on Qandil mountain, Brigadier General Metin Gurak told reporters. The mountain on the Iranian-Iraqi border is where the rebel group's leaders are believed to be based. He said the warplanes took care to spare civilians from harm, but in northern Iraq, spokesman Ahmed Deniz of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, said the air raid had damaged a school and wounded three people. (AP)

MOSCOW - Russia will lend Venezuela $1 billion for arms purchases and military development, a Kremlin spokesman said yesterday, the second day of a visit here by President Hugo Chávez aimed at tightening a relationship that has caused increasing discomfort in the West. Chávez met with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday. Yesterday, he traveled to the southern city of Orenburg near the border with Kazakhstan to meet with President Dmitri A. Medvedev. (New York Times News Service)