NEW YORK

Bronx leader gets 5 years for corruption Larry Seabrook, a pillar of Bronx politics whose nearly three-decade tenure included stints as an assemblyman, state senator and City Council member, was sentenced to five years in prison for his corruption conviction. Seabrook, 61, was also ordered to pay $620,000 in restitution to the city of New York. He was convicted in July of orchestrating a scheme to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars in city money to friends and relatives and a girlfriend through a network of nonprofit groups.

MARYLAND

Judge cuts possible WikiLeaks sentence A military judge reduced the potential sentence for an Army private accused of sending reams of classified documents to the Wiki- Leaks website. Col. Denise Lind made the ruling during a pretrial hearing at Fort Meade for Pfc. Bradley Manning. Lind found that Manning suffered illegal pretrial punishment during nine months in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. She awarded a total of 112 days off any prison sentence Manning gets if he is convicted. Manning was confined to a windowless cell 23 hours a day, sometimes with no clothing. Brig officials say it was to keep him from hurting himself or others.

AFGHANISTAN

British soldier is first 2013 'insider' victim A British soldier who was helping to build quarters for the Afghan National Army in southern Afghanistan was fatally shot by an Afghan soldier in the first insider attack of 2013. The attacker also shot and wounded six other British soldiers in the engineering regiment, three of them seriously, before being killed, Afghan and British officials said.

INDIA

Pakistan is accused of killing two soldiers Indian army officials said two of their soldiers were slain by Pakistani troops who attacked a military post in Kashmir, the second fatal clash in the divided region in two days. News reports, citing army sources, said at least one of the bodies was beheaded.

JAPAN

Standoff with China escalates over islands The Japanese Foreign Ministry summoned China's ambassador after Chinese ships entered Japanese-controlled waters for 13 hours, a prolonged incursion that seemed to escalate a standoff over a group of disputed islands. The ministry strongly protested the incursion by four Chinese surveillance ships near the islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. The uninhabited island chain, near Okinawa, has been controlled by Japan for decades but is also claimed by China and Taiwan. The Chinese ambassador, Cheng Yonghua, responded by saying the islands belong to China.

FRANCE

Budget minister under investigation French prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation into accusations that Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac earlier in his career had a secret Swiss bank account to avoid France's high taxes. The announcement that an investigation was being launched by the Paris prosecutor's office was described as an attempt to get to the bottom of the reports from the investigative Website Mediapart and not as an indication that authorities have their own reasons to suspect Cahuzac might be guilty of tax evasion. Nevertheless, the judicial inquiry was considered an embarrassment for President Francois Hollande's Socialist government.

NEWS SERVICES