In brief: Islamic State close to key border town

BEIRUT – Islamic State militants were reported Sunday to be closing in on a strategic border town in northwestern Syria’s Aleppo province near the Turkish frontier after routing rival rebel groups in fierce clashes.

Pro-opposition activists hostile to Islamic State said Sunday that the militants in their latest thrust had overrun the village of Soran, east of the Syrian border town of Azaz, and nearby areas.

Islamic State forces were widely expected to assault Azaz, which has been in the hands of insurgents hostile to Islamic State for more than a year.

The town is a strategic prize because of its proximity to the giant Bab al-Salam border crossing into Turkey, a major transit point for goods and supplies entering northern Syria.

Elsewhere in Syria, state media and other reports indicated that at least 25 people, including children, were killed when a fuel tank exploded at a clinic in the predominantly Kurdish northeastern city of Qamishli, which has largely been spared the violence seen elsewhere in Syria. The cause of the fuel tank explosion was not immediately clear.

Smithsonian to show slave ship artifacts

WASHINGTON – The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will display objects from a slave ship that sank off the coast of Cape Town in 1794.

The artifacts were retrieved this year from the wreck site of a Portuguese slave ship that sank on its way to Brazil while carrying more than 400 enslaved Africans from Mozambique. Objects recovered from the ship, called the Sco Josi-Paquete de Africa, include iron ballasts used to weigh the ship down and copper fastenings that held the structure of the ship together.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the director of the African American history museum, said in a statement that the ship “represents one of the earliest attempts to bring East Africans into the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

“This discovery is significant because there has never been archaeological documentation of a vessel that foundered and was lost while carrying a cargo of enslaved persons,” he said.