In brief: Syrian air bombings kill a dozen children

BEIRUT – Syrian government warplanes carried out airstrikes on a rebellious neighborhood in the capital and a village in the country’s northeast on Sunday, killing at least 25 people, including a dozen children, activists said.

On Sunday, a government jet bombed rebel-held areas in the predominantly Kurdish village of Hadad in the northeastern province of Hassaka, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said at least 16 people were killed, including two women and three children.

Another airstrike on the Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun killed at least nine children, the Observatory said.

The SANA state news agency said “terrorists” fired mortar rounds that struck a bus station in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, killing four people and wounding 20. The Syrian regime describes those trying to topple Assad as “terrorists.”

Late Canadian leader’s son to lead party

TORONTO – The eldest son of late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau is the new leader of Canada’s once dominant Liberal Party after winning a landslide vote announced Sunday.

Justin Trudeau, a charismatic member of Parliament since 2008, won 80 percent party support on the first ballot. The 41-year-old takes over a party that dominated Canada for much of the last century but was relegated to third-party status in the last election.

Pierre Trudeau, who died at age 80 in 2000, was prime minister for almost all of a 16-year stretch from 1968-84.

Police find seven bodies in Cancun house

CANCUN, Mexico – Police in Mexico have found the bodies of five men and two women at a house in a low-income neighborhood of the resort city of Cancun.

The director of the Quintana Roo state detective agency said the victims’ hands, heads and feet had been tied up with packing tape, and they apparently were asphyxiated. Arturo Olivares Mendiola said the bodies were found Sunday.

The bodies had been left on a patio of a house located some distance from the city’s tourist zone.