GREENLAND: Troops from several European countries continued to arrive today in a show of support for Denmark, as talks between representatives of Denmark, Greenland and the United States highlighted “fundamental disagreement” over the future of the Arctic island.

Several European states, including France, Germany, Britain, Norway and Sweden, started sending symbolic numbers of troops on Wednesday or promised to do so.

CUBA: Soldiers marched out of a plane at Havana airport today carrying urns containing the remains of the 32 Cuban officers killed during the deadly US attack on Venezuela on January 3.

Cuban Interior Minister Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casa said Venezuela was not a distant land for those killed but a “natural extension of their homeland.”

He called the dead officers “heroes,” and “a lesson for those who waver.”

INDIA: Authorities announced today that a medical college in Indian-administered Kashmir has been closed, in what appears to be a capitulation to protests by far-right Hindu groups over the enrolment of a majority of Muslim students onto a medical course.

Of the 50 students admitted in November to the five-year bachelor’s degree course in medicine, 42 were Muslims, while seven were Hindus and one a Sikh.

AUSTRALIA: An arts festival has apologised to Randa Abdel-Fattah after it was forced to cancel its writers’ week programme when 180 authors withdrew from the event in solidarity with the Palestinian-Australian writer.

The board of the Adelaide Festival said today it was retracting its earlier decision to exclude Ms Abdel-Fattah “from participating as a speaker” in this year’s writers’ week.