■ China
Five die in lab explosion
Five people were killed and two others injured, one critically, when a chemical laboratory exploded in east China, state media said yesterday. The accident occurred on Friday in a lab at the Jusheng Fluorine Chemical Corp in Zhejiang Province, Xinhua news agency said. The cause of the blast was being investigated. Jusheng, which mainly produces fluorine refrigerant, is a subsidiary of Juhua, the largest chemical enterprise in Zhejiang.
■ China
Leaking gas well capped
Engineers have capped a leaking gas well in southwest China that forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, the Xinhua news agency reported. The 3.4km-deep well, owned by China National Petroleum Corp, began leaking last Saturday, and was finally capped early on Friday, the official agency said. The leakage at the well in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, began during final tests before it was to have gone into production. Two earlier attempts to cap it failed on Monday and Wednesday. Xinhua said more than 10,000 people who lived within 1km of the well had had to leave home but should now be able to return.
■ China
Quake rattles Jilin
A moderate earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale shook northeast China, but there were no immediate reports of casualties, state media and local officials said yesterday. The epicenter of the quake, which hit at 8:23pm on Friday, was in Laoyingtai Village, Songyuan City, about 200km north of Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, Xinhua news agency quoted local seismologists as saying.
■ Afghanistan
Gunmen murder lawmaker
Gunmen broke into the home of a local lawmaker in northern Afghanistan and killed him yesterday, the latest in a string of attacks against regional leaders, officials said. Sayed Sadeq, the speaker of the Tahhar provincial governing assembly, died in hospital after receiving multiple gunshots to his body, said Ghulam Hazarat, the deputy local police chief. He said it was not clear who was behind the killing and that an investigation had been launched. Sadeq was well respected in the region and was a supporter of the US-backed government.
■ Hong Kong
Chertoff visits port company
The US Homeland Security secretary yesterday toured a port operated by a company that's poised to win a US bid to screen shipping cargo for nuclear threats in the Bahamas. Michael Chertoff spent the morning at the port owned by the conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. The US government is close to awarding Hutchison a no-bid, US$6 million contract to help detect nuclear materials inside cargo passing through the port in Freeport, Bahamas. The contract represents the first time a foreign company will be involved in running US radiation-detection equipment at an overseas port without the presence of US Customs agents, which has worried some US lawmakers.
■ Australia
Lampoonery bites back
The biggest-selling national newspaper crudely lampooned Indonesia's president yesterday in the continuing furor over Canberra's decision to accept a group of Indonesians from the restive province of Papua as refugees. A cartoon in the Weekend Australian depicts Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as a male dog copulating with a concerned Papuan who is also represented as a dog. The smiling Yudhoyono, his tail wagging, says: "Don't take this the wrong way," above a caption that reads: "no offense intended." The work replies to a cartoon that appeared in an Indonesian newspaper this week that portrayed Prime Minister John Howard and his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer as two copulating dingoes.
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