BEIJING: China’s legislature adopted a national security law on Wednesday that covers everything from cyber security to activities in space, state news agency Xinhua said. President Xi Jinping, who heads a newly established national security commission, has said China’s security covers a wide range of areas, including politics, culture, the military, the economy, technology and the environment. The law would “protect people’s fundamental interests”, Xinhua said in a brief one-line statement. Foreign business groups and diplomats have argued that the broadness of the national security law, passed by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, constitutes a national security overreach.

Three shot dead

QUETTA: Two assailants on a motorcycle on Wednesday shot dead three welders at a shop in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, in what police said was an ethnically motivated attack. “Unknown gunmen on a motorcycle had shot dead three welders at a shop and fled the scene,” senior police official Abdul Razzaq Cheema told AFP. He said the incident appeared to be an “ethnic” killing as the victims were from Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, which has dominated the country’s affairs since independence from Britain in 1947. Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Seven die in bus-crash

BEIJING: At least seven South Koreans were killed on Wednesday in a bus crash in northeastern China, state media said, while a government official in Seoul put the toll at 10. The bus, carrying 26 South Koreans, swerved off a bridge in the northeastern Chinese city of Jian, Jilin province. It had fallen into a river, according to a ministry official in Seoul. The ministry was trying to confirm the death toll and feared it could rise above 10, the unnamed official told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. Official Chinese news agency Xinhua said that seven Koreans were killed, along with a Chinese tour guide and local driver, quoting local government sources. Photographs showed the wreckage of the bus, upside down, half in the water, with a bulldozer trying to lift it. The victims were travelling on a training programme organised by a South Korean government ministry. A consular official in Shenyang has been dispatched to the scene of the accident to take stock of the situation, Yonhap said.