Former Pertamina president dies: Former state-owned oil and gas

Former Pertamina president dies: Former state-owned oil and gas firm Pertamina president Faisal Abda'oe passed away on Wednesday evening at the Siloam Gleneagles Hospital, Tangerang, near Jakarta. He was 71. Pertamina spokesman M. Harun said that Faisal would be buried in his home village Pringgokusuman, Yogyakarta on Thursday morning. Faisal led Pertamina from 1988 to 1998 and was the company's second-longest serving president after Ibnu Sutowo. He was granted several medals of honor from the government including the Bintang Mahaputra in 1994. --JP

Angry protest as South Korea, China lock horns: Angry protesters scuffled with police and burnt a Chinese national flag in Seoul on Wednesday as tensions between China and South Korea over North Korean asylum seekers continued to rise. Some 300 South Korean activists and North Korean defectors set fire to the Red Flag just outside the Chinese embassy in central Seoul, witnesses said. --AFP

Armed assailants storm university hall in Nigeria: Armed men stormed a university hall in Nigeria and opened fire on engineering students taking examinations, killing at least a dozen people, including two lecturers, witnesses and police said on Wednesday. The attack took place in on Saturday at the University of Nigeria campus in Nsukka. --AP

Riyadh bars foreigners from interrogating al-Qaeda suspects: Saudi authorities will not allow foreign security personnel to interrogate its 13 detained al-Qaeda suspects, a government- controlled Saudi newspaper reported on Wednesday, describing a policy that could strain U.S.-Saudi relations. The daily Okaz said access to 11 Saudis, an Iraqi and a Sudanese will be limited to Saudi authorities because "the crimes that they committed or planned to carry out occurred or were going to take place on Saudi territories." --AP