Briefs, December 24, 2012
Dozens of people were killed and wounded in an air strike on a bakery in Syria's central Hama province yesterday, activists said, with some reporting up to 200 dead.
BEIRUT - Dozens of people were killed and wounded in an air strike on a bakery in Syria's central Hama province yesterday, activists said, with some reporting up to 200 dead. Regime forces bombarded a bakery and committed a massacre that killed dozens of people, including women and children," said the Local Co-ordination Committees, a grass-roots network of activists. A video distributed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights showed a bombed one-storey block, and a crater in the road beside it. Bloodied bodies lay on the road, while others could be seen in the rubble. AFP
ATHENS - Greek prosecutors will investigate some 2,000 holders of HSBC bank accounts in Switzerland for suspected tax evasion. The finance ministry said it had received the list, which was leaked in 2010 by an HSBC employee and passed on to Greece by France's then finance minister Christine Lagarde, the current head of the International Monetary Fund. Greek authorities had claimed that the list was illegally obtained and hence could not be used in the battle against tax evasion. But mounting anger against a new round of austerity cuts put pressure on the government to seek the list. AFP