■ China
Stowaway still recovering
A 14-year-old boy who survived a 700km flight stowed in the landing gear of a plane has been diagnosed with sunken eardrums and trauma to his ear nerves. The boy was deprived of oxygen and exposed to cold air during the flight in 2003 in which another teenage boy died after falling from the landing gear as the jet took off from Yunnan province's capital city Kunming. Since the incident the boy has suffered headaches, poor hearing and dizziness. The family's local doctors have been unable to find a cure and the family are appealing for help. The boys had run away from home and apparently wanted to experience flying, reports said.
■ Hong Kong
BBQ briquettes dangerous
Barbecue briquettes may soon be sold under lock and key in Hong Kong where calls are growing for restrictions on their sale following a spate of charcoal-burning suicides. Supermarkets chains in the former British colony will hold talks with suicide prevention officials to discuss ways of curbing a growing trend among suicides who gas themselves by burning charcoal in unventilated rooms. The talks, reported in the Sunday Morning Post, follow the release of figures showing some 300 people kill themselves each year by burning charcoal -- a quarter of all Hong Kong suicides in 2003. The trend has even spread to other parts of the region, including Japan, Taiwan and New Zealand. Campaigners want charcoal sales to come under the same restrictions as guns and drugs. "We believe suicide prevention is everyone's business," said Paul Yip, director of Hong Kong University's suicide prevention center.
■ Philippines
Jesus has tight security
Security was tight in the Philippine capital of Manila Sunday as thousands of people gathered for an annual Roman Catholic procession despite a foiled plot to bomb the event. Tens of thousands of Catholic devotees take part in the annual procession in which an ebony icon of Jesus is taken from the Quiapo church and paraded around the district. Police suspect Muslim separatists. Superintendent Romulo Sapitula, a district police chief, urged devotees not to bring too much cash or wear jewelry to avoid attracting robbers. On Friday, police arrested 16 suspects allegedly plotting to bomb the Black Nazarene procession. Police also seized three powerful homemade bombs, which were similar to an explosive device found in a passenger bus in Quiapo on Christmas Eve.
■ Sri Lanka
Grenades kill three
Two hand grenades hurled in a rare clash between Christians and Hindus killed at least three people and injured 37 others in a part of eastern Sri Lanka where international aid workers are helping tsunami victims, police said. No aid workers were injured. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in Sri Lanka to see tsunami damage, was in Colombo at the time of the blast. Two suspected assailants were arrested soon after the attack in a Tamil rebel-controlled area late Saturday. Anil, a police officer in the eastern town of Valaichchenai, said Christians were angry that Hindus had demolished a church and may have carried out the attack in retaliation. Clashes between Hindus and Christians are rare since both groups belong to the Tamil minority and believe they are oppressed by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority.
■ France
Airport says threat is a hoax
Authorities discretely stepped up security at the Nice international airport after receiving a letter threatening a toxic gas attack that they dismissed as a probable hoax, a ranking official said. Nevertheless, a long-delayed readiness exercise to counter nuclear, chemical and biological attacks was planned for yesterday, when the threatening letter said the attack would take place, said Francoise Souliman, top aide at the Alpes-Maritime prefecture, or regional government. "We received a threatening letter. But after analysis by specialized services, it appears rather fanciful,'' she said on Saturday. The letter, written in German and signed by a mysterious group decrying globa-lization, was received on Friday by officials of the Nice-Cote d'Azur airport.
■ South Africa
Australian diver feared dead
An Australian deep water diver was feared dead on Saturday after he disappeared in one of the world's deepest freshwater caves while trying to recover the remains of another diver, reports in South Africa said. Dave Shaw, an experienced diver, was one of several who took to the waters of Boesmansgat, a large dolomite sinkhole in the north of the country, in a bid to retrieve the body of a diver who drowned there about 10 years ago. Shaw disappeared at a depth of 270m. When another member of the team failed to locate him, he sent word to the surface that he could not find the father of two and Cathay Pacific pilot. The operation was called off and police indicated a search was unlikely because of the danger involved. In October, Shaw set a record when he reached a depth of 271m in nine hours at Boesmansgat. During the attempt, he came across the remains of fellow diver Deon Dreyer who had perished there in 1994 during a dive as a 20- year-old.
■ Congo
Russian aid workers die
Six Russians were killed on Saturday when their aircraft flying humanitarian aid to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) developed engine problems and crashed after taking off in Uganda, officials said in Kampala. The Antonov transport plane registered in DRC, with Russians on board, crashed into a village near the airport, where it had taken off at 12:48pm, Ugandan Communications Minister John Nasasira said in a statement released in Kampala. "It crashed about 12 minutes after take-off and investigations into the possible cause of the accident have been instituted," Nasasira added. The plane burst into flames on hitting the ground in Uganda's Bukaraza village in Wakiso district, an airport official said.
■ Italy
Train-crash toll up to 16
The death toll from a head-on collision of a passenger train and a freight train near the northern Italian city of Bologna rose to 16 on Saturday as questions were raised over the safety of the Italian rail system. The news agency ANSA, quoting the regional authority, reported that the bodies of the two crew of the freight train, who had not been counted among the dead, had been pulled from the wreckage. The head of the regional civil protection service, Demetrio Egidi, earlier told journalists, "Rescue teams are continuing to work and the toll is not definitive." The two trains collided on a stretch of single track near Crevalcore, leaving the forward passenger cars a jumble of torn metal. Four separate probes are under way into the cause of the accident.
■ Iraq
US bomb hits wrong house
The US military said it dropped a 225kg bomb on the wrong house outside the northern city of Mosul, killing five people. The man who owned the house said the bomb killed 14 people, and an Associated Press photographer said seven of them were children. The strike Saturday in the town of Aitha, 50km south of Mosul, came hours before a senior US Embassy official in Iraq met with leaders of the Sunni Arab community to apply political pressure against their threat to boycott Jan. 30 elections. The Arab satellite broadcaster al-Jazeera said the Sunnis asked the Americans to announce a timetable for a US troop withdrawal. Violence also continued, with at least eight Iraqis killed.
■ United States
Iraqi hit squads proposed
The Pentagon is debating whether to set up elite hit-squads to target leaders of the Iraq insurgency in a new strategy based on tactics used against leftist guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago, Newsweek magazine reported on Saturday. One proposal would send US Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads of hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, Newsweek said, citing military insiders familiar with the discussions. The squads may operate across the border in Syria, Newsweek said on its Web site, but added it was unclear whether they would assassinate leaders or be involved in "snatch" operations.
■ Iran
Top Iraqi spy arrested
A top Iraqi spy was arrested in western Iran, a Tehran press agency reported yesterday. The Mehr news service quoted security sources as saying that the unnamed man was sent to the border province of Kurdistan on behalf of Iraqi interim Defense Minister Hazem al-Shaalan to forge documents proving al-Shaalan's charges against Iran. The Iraqi defense minister has several times accused Iran of being behind the unrest in Iraq and in contact with insurgents. Tehran has, however, consistently rejected the charges. The sources further said that the spy is currently under interrogation.
■ United States
Body of crash victim found
The body of a missing man was found Saturday, bringing the death toll to nine in a train crash that caused a leak of toxic chlorine gas in a small community in Carolina. In the meantime, Lieutenant Michael Frank of the Aiken County Sheriff's Department said, emergency crews continued to try to patch the leak on one of the cars of the 42-car train that derailed Thursday in Graniteville, near the Georgia state line. "Approximately 40 tonnes of crushed lime was applied to this spill site to begin neutralizing chlorine on the ground," Frank said. He added, however, that the mandatory evacuation order for 2km around the crash site would remain in effect until at least Wednesday.
■ United States
Tsunami shifts well's water
The South Asian earthquake that spawned deadly tsunami waves also shifted water levels by at least 0.9m in a geologically sensitive Virginia well some 15,450km away from the epicenter, researchers say. The well near Christiansburg, which started oscillating about an hour after the magnitude 9 quake near Sumatra on Dec. 26, is particularly sensitive to movements in the Earth and is monitored by the US Geological Survey.
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