WORLD BRIEFS

ISRAEL: A nation's 65th birthday

Israel began observing its annual Memorial Day on Sunday evening, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of militant attacks. At 8 p.m., air raid sirens sounded nationwide to mark a minute of silence. At sundown Monday, the country shifts its mood to mark its 65th Independence Day with fireworks and picnics. "Today there are also those who rise up against us and threaten to destroy us. They did not succeed in the past, and they will never succeed," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Memorial Day ceremony Sunday. Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948. Israel marks the day according to the lunar Hebrew calendar. This year's Hebrew date is April 15-16 on the Western calendar.

MEXICO: Teachers marching in protest

Teachers marched by the thousands through the streets of Atliaca in Guerrero state Sunday, some masked and brandishing metal bars in an escalating education showdown that's become a key test of President Enrique Peña Nieto's sweeping reforms for Mexico's most dysfunctional institutions. His first major legislative victory after taking office in December was a constitutional amendment eliminating a decades-old practice of buying and selling teaching jobs, replacing it with a standardized national teaching test. That's heresy to a radical splinter union of elementary and high school teachers in Guerrero, who fear a plot to fire them en masse as a step toward privatizing education. There is little evidence the government plans that.

CHINA: 4-year-old's flu raises alarms

Bird flu was found in a 4-year-old Beijing boy who has no symptoms of the infection, authorities said, suggesting more people may be catching the H7N9 influenza virus than reported. Health workers discovered the first asymptomatic H7N9 case, the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau said Sunday. The boy's parents are poultry and fish sellers and their neighbors had bought chicken sold by the family of a 7-year-old girl whose H7N9 infection was reported two days ago. "There has been a spike in pneumonia cases," said Ian Mackay of the University of Queensland in Brisbane. "The virus may have been going around as a normal cold."