■ South Korea
Kim blasts `hated' US
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has spoken of the nation's "burning hatred" towards the US amid ongoing US-South Korean war games. Kim's comments were made during his inspection of an army unit, the official Korean Central News Agency said on Saturday. "Our army and people are turning out as one in the sacred anti-US struggle with burning hatred for the US imperialist aggressors and the unshakable resolution to take revenge upon them," Kim was quoted as saying. "No force on earth can match the single-mindedly united forces in the DPRK [North Korea] which no weapon can ever frighten or destroy."
■ South Korea
Stampede injures 16
Tens of thousands of people crowded to get free admission to an amusement park in Seoul yesterday, triggering a brief stampede that injured 16 people, officials said. About 50,000 people were waiting outside the Lotte World theme park on the first day of a six-day, free-admission event, when the accident happened, said Kim Heung-kyu, a park official. Kim said it was not clear how many people were involved in the stampede, but 16 people sustained broken bones, abrasions and other relatively minor injuries.
■ Malaysia
Envoy lashes at Myanmar
Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar criticized Myanmar's military government for refusing to let him meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during his ASEAN fact-finding visit there, the New Straits Times newspaper reported yesterday. Syed Hamid returned from Yangon on Friday following a two-day visit. The envoy said the ruling junta gave him a list of actions it would take toward political reforms, but refused to let him meet with the detained Nobel peace laureate Suu Kyi, the Times said. "I told them that it would have been better if I had been allowed to meet Suu Kyi and other political leaders as it would be a step towards their democratic reform," Syed Hamid said.
■ India
Soldier killed in ambush
An Indian soldier was killed and seven wounded when Muslim guerrillas attacked an army convoy yesterday on the outskirts of Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, the army said. A spokesman from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group called up newspaper offices in Srinagar, claiming responsibility for the attack which came two days after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh proposed a peace treaty with Pakistan. "There was a heavy exchange of fire," army spokesman V.K. Batra said. He said one of the attackers was also killed in the incident which took place near Pampore.
■ Pakistan
Four killed in shootout
Suspected rebel tribesmen attacked a mountaintop military post yesterday in the southwest, triggering a gunbattle with security forces that left two attackers and a soldier dead, an official said. Another attacker was killed in a land mine explosion as he tried to escape on a motorcycle after the shootout near Sui, a town southeast of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, a government official, Abdul Samad Lasi, said. Two soldiers were injured in the gun fight, he said. The roadside post was attacked before more than a thousand tribal people were to travel along there to Dera Bugti, another town near Sui, Lasi said. The former refugees were returning to their homeland in a government-sponsored program aimed at restoring their lives in the ancestral region they left because of tribal feuding.
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