PARIS

Man arrested in shooting of journalist, other attacks

After a two-day nationwide manhunt, French police arrested a man Wednesday night suspected of shooting a newspaper assistant photographer and three other attacks.

The motive for the attacks remains unclear.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls identified the suspect as Abdelhakim Dekhar, convicted in 1998 as an accomplice in a high-profile 1994 robbery and car chase that left three police officers and a taxi driver dead. Dekhar served four years in prison in the so-called Rey-Maupin affair but authorities had no trace of him in recent years, Valls said.

Based on DNA data, authorities believe he was the lone gunman behind Monday’s shooting at the prominent daily newspaper Liberation, a shooting outside French bank Societe Generale, a brief hostage-taking in which the suspect hijacked a car, and a similar shooting incident three days before at news network BFM-TV.

The shooting prompted cries of concern about attacks on the media. Security was tightened at media offices and on the busy Champs-Elysees avenue.

CAIRO

Suicide car bomb kills 11, wounds 37 off-duty soldiers

A suicide car bomb hit a bus convoy of off-duty Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday, killing 11 and wounding 37, in the latest of a stepped-up wave of attacks blamed on Islamic militants sympathetic to ousted President Mohammed Morsi.

The mounting insurgency in the restive Sinai has sent security and intelligence agencies scrambling for new tactics to thwart future attacks and protect themselves amid signs of the violence creeping into other parts of Egypt, particularly the capital, Cairo.

Among the attacks that have raised alarm was the killing of a senior security officer who monitors Islamist groups, gunned down in his Cairo neighborhood Sunday night. At dawn Wednesday, assailants threw a grenade at a police checkpoint in a northern Cairo suburb, injuring four policemen, according to security officials said. The assailants fled the scene.

The violence has prompted a shakeup within security agencies’ ranks, including a hunt for possible Islamist “moles” amid officials’ suspicions that Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is linked to the violence.

LA PAZ, Bolivia

President’s surprise decree means triple pay for workers

President Evo Morales decreed Wednesday that an extra month’s wages should be paid as a special Christmas bonus to all salaried workers in Bolivia, at state agencies, in the military and police and in the private sector.

Bolivian law already requires that salaried workers get a month’s pay as a December bonus, so they will now get triple their pay for that month.

The leftist president said he made the surprise announcement because his government’s goal is to reduce poverty and more equally distribute the wealth in one of South America’s poorest nations.

– From news service reports