■ China
Trapped miners rescued
Eight coal miners who were trapped when a tunnel collapsed were rescued early yesterday after 40 hours underground, a news report said. The miners were trapped on Tuesday when the ceiling collapsed in the Xieqiao Coal Mine in Fuyang, Anhui Province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. They were weak but in good condition following their rescue, Xinhua said. The cause of the cave-in wasn't reported.
■ Indonesia
Fires spark anger
Environment ministers from Southeast Asian nations afflicted by an acrid haze from land-clearing fires are to meet in Indonesia. Malaysia and Singapore have been angered by the haze from fires raging in Sumatra and Kalimantan in Indonesia, which every year drift over parts of the region. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who apologized yesterday to the two nations over the crisis, telephoned Singapore's prime minister to tell him the meeting was set for today in Pekanbaru, his spokesman said. Environment ministers from Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand are to attend, a statement from the foreign affairs ministry said.
■ China
Playboy files lawsuit
US-based entertainment group Playboy has filed a lawsuit in a bid to protect its famous rabbit's head logo from copyright abuse in China, state-run press reported yesterday. Playboy has accused three Chinese companies of producing shirts with logos similar to Playboy's signature trademark, according to the China Daily. Its lawsuit also says a fourth defendant, a salesman, sold the shirts to a department store in Beijing.
■ Australia
Number of HIV cases surges
New cases of HIV are at their highest point in a decade, a report said yesterday. Australia has experienced a 41 percent increase in new cases since 2000, according to the latest report from the National Center in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "It might be here that improvements in HIV treatments have lessened the motivation for people to protect themselves sexually," the center's deputy director professor John Kaldor speculated. While the increase could be due to more people coming forward for diagnosis, it was highly likely practising safe sex was considered less important for than it once was, he said.
■ Thailand
Customs officials seize crocs
Authorities seized more than 200 live crocodiles on Wednesday that were being smuggled from Cambodia, customs officials said. The animals were seized by customs officials in Chonburi Province, 80km from Bangkok. "They were probably being imported to captive breeding facilities in Thailand," said Tassanee Vejpongsa of WildAid, a non-profit group seeking to stop the illegal animal trade. Crocodiles are almost extinct in the wild and it is illegal to import or export them without government permission, she said.
■ New Zealand
Maori to press for pensions
A descendant of the Maori chief who signed an 1840 treaty with the British crown said yesterday he will lead a campaign for Maori to claim retirement pensions from Britain. David Rankin, a direct descendant of warrior chief Hone Heke, said the claim would be made under Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi. This guarantees indigenous Maori "the same rights and privileges as British subjects."
■ United Kingdom
Children's song foils theft
A group of school children helped foil an armored van robbery by memorizing the getaway car's registration plate in a school yard chant, police in Liverpool said on Wednesday. A passer-by who spotted the car, but feared she would forget the plate number, she asked a group of children to memorize it. The nine and 10-year-olds remembered the plate numbers by turning them into a chant, before a classmate arrived with a pen. The three thieves were traced and arrested within 40 minutes, police said. ``The lady did not have a pen or paper on her so went over to the children and repeated the registration number to them,'' a spokeswoman for Merseyside Police said.
■ United Kingdom
Inventor makes perfect egg
A 23-year-old product design student says he has cracked the age-old riddle of how to boil the perfect egg -- get rid of the water. Simon Rhymes uses powerful light bulbs instead of boiling water to cook the egg. The gadget does the job in six minutes, and then chops off the top of the egg to allow dipping with toast. "Many people are confused,"Rhymes told BBC radio on Wednesday. "This simply uses four 500-watt bulbs to heat the egg directly." Rhymes said he has secured a patent and is in talks to mass-produce the device.
■ Angola
Road crash kills 16
A bus and a truck collided near the Porto Amboim, 300km south of capital Luanda, killing 16 people and injuring 14 others, Angolan Ecclesia radio reported. The accident happened on Tuesday night, when a bus connecting between Benguela and Luanda crashed into a truck parked on the side of the road, Ecclesia said. The bus was carrying 55 passengers. Authorities said the accident could have been caused by excessive speed.
■ Germany
Driver rams train
A car rammed into an oncoming commuter train at a crossing in Dresden early yesterday, killing the driver of the vehicle and injuring several other people, police said. It was not immediately clear why the car smashed into the train, causing several carriages to run off the tracks, said Jana Ulbricht, a spokeswoman for police in Dresden. The number of injured was also unclear.
■ Congo
Cabinet, governors named
President Joseph Kabila has named 15 governors and new Cabinet members after their predecessors moved on to the new parliament, according to a presidential decree on Wednesday. The new top aides included two military men, worrying to some amid tension in the lead-up to a presidential run-off at the end of the month that pits Kabila against a former warlord. General Denis Kalume was named interior minister and Admiral Liwanga Numbi was named governor of Kinshasa. The 500-member legislature was sworn in last month.
■ Czech Republic
Cats linked to male births
Researchers say women infected with a common cat parasite give birth to more sons than daughters. Toxoplasma is spread by contaminated cat feces, but also lurks in uncooked pork and beef. Scientiest reviewed the medical records of 1,803 babies borns between 1996 and 2004 and discovered that women whose antibody count was high -- suggesting a substantial infection -- had a much higher chance of having baby boys -- up to a 72 percent chance.
■ Canada
Beer truck thief nabbed
A man suspected of stealing a loaded beer truck was nabbed after a police dog followed a trail of beer and clothes to find him hiding on top of a porch, Edmonton police said on Tuesday. The police dog was called out to a parking lot on Monday morning where a beer delivery truck, recently stolen outside a liquor store, had been abandoned after a collision. Police spokesman Karen Carlson said the dog and its handler followed a trail of discarded beer, a cooler, a hand cart and pieces of clothing to a nearby apartment building. "I guess the dog had a pretty good scent to go on," Carlson said.
■ Colombia
Large heroin stash seized
Calling it the biggest heroin seizure ever in the country, police uncovered 57kg of the narcotic hidden among sacks of potatoes in San Andres, a popular transit point for drugs being smuggled into the US. The drugs, stashed in 4,000 individual latex capsules, were shown to journalists yesterday, two days after anti-narcotic police made the seizure during a routine inspection of a cargo boat arriving from the mainland port city of Barranquilla. No arrests have been made.
■ United States
Sports pre-empts ER stop
Not even a medical emergency can pull some men away from a TV showing their favorite sports teams, a US study has determined. University of Maryland emergency physician David Jerrard tracked nearly 800 regular season college and professional football, baseball and basketball games in the state over three years and found there always was an increase in the number of men who checked into emergency rooms after these events. Jerrard's study, to be presented on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians Research Forum in New Orleans, showed about 50 percent more men registered in emergency rooms after a football game than during the event itself.
■ Canada
Activists slam roach eating
An animal rights group in Toronto called on Tuesday for a New York-based theme park operator to cancel a competition in which people will try to break the world cockroach-eating record. Six Flags is staging the contest in its Gurnee, Illinois, park as part of a promotion leading up to Halloween in which it is also offering customers free entry or line-jumping advantages if they eat a live Madagascar hissing cockroach. "Insects do not deserve to be eaten alive especially for a gratuitous marketing gimmick," said Jackie Vergerio, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
■ Mexico
Gunmen shoot club owner
The recent string of executions plaguing Acapulco claimed its first foreign victim yesterday, when gunmen killed the Pakistani owner of a local nightclub. Gullirez Hissain Hamit Dany, 46, was shot to death while sitting in a truck outside his Platinum 2000 nightclub, said Eduardo Murueta, the attorney general of Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located. "We have no record of any complaint about threats against him," said Murueta, adding that police were investigating the crime, in which the three gunmen apparently fled in a car after the killing. Three assailants yesterday also shot to death a bus driver, Pedro Gonzalez Aguilar. "The passengers were panic-stricken," said Jorge Valdez Reycen, a spokesman for the Acapulco police department. "The gunmen opened fire while the bus was moving."
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
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