■ CHINA
Coal mine fire traps 15
A fire at a coal mine has trapped 15 workers and has been burning since Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency said. Rescuers at the Shanxi Province mine have found three bodies, though 18 people managed to escape, the report yesterday said. "It is not clear whether the 15 trapped miners are still alive or not, and the fire is yet to be quenched," it quoted Wang Xingui, deputy head of the rescue team, as saying. The country's coal industry is the deadliest in the world, with 2,163 miners killed in 1,320 accidents in the first seven months of this year.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Roh mulls walk over border
President Roh Moo-Hyun is considering "walking across" the heavily-fortified border to North Korea for a summit early next month, a report said yesterday. Chosun Ilbo, the largest circulation daily said. However, the idea had sparked concerns about the safety of the head of state. Roh is to visit the North by car via the truce border village of Panmunjeon from Oct. 2 to Oct. 4 for peace talks with the North's leader Kim Jong-il -- only the second inter-Korean summit in the six decades since the peninsula was divided. Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, traveled to the North by air for the first-ever peace summit with Kim in 2000. "Using an overland route for this summit unlike the first one, we're considering showing the president walking across the border line, the symbol of the divided Korea," an unnamed government official told Chosun. The idea, if realized, would allow Roh to drop off his car near the inter-Korean military demarcation line and walk across with his staff, the paper said.
■ INDIA
Man murdered priest
A Hindu man serving a life sentence for burning alive an Australian Christian missionary and his two sons was given another jail term on Saturday for murdering a Catholic priest. Dara Singh is serving a life term in Orissa state for the January 1999 killings of Graham Staines and his two sons, aged eight and 10. On Saturday, a court handed Singh and three others life terms for battering to death 35-year-old Arul Doss, a priest, in September 1999, a court official said. Seventeen others suspected of involvement in the hate crime were set free for lack of evidence, the official said.
■ MALAYSIA
Fees proposed for drivers
Authorities in the nation's biggest city plan to impose a fee on motorists as part of efforts to reduce traffic congestion in downtown areas, a report said yesterday. Two million vehicles ply Kuala Lumpur's streets daily and the city has recorded traffic growth of 10 percent to 15 percent each year, Mayor Abdul Hakim Borhan was quoted by national news agency Bernama as saying on a visit to Stockholm, Sweden. Under the system, vehicles will have their license plates recorded when they enter certain streets, and owners will be required to pay the fee at a bank or convenience store. Drivers who don't pay will be fined, the report said.
■ CHINA
Checks of US hides intensify
Inspectors in the northeast have stepped up checks on cattle hides imported from the US after finding live flies in six shipments, state media said yesterday. The move appeared to be part of Beijing's efforts to show that products from other countries also have quality problems after facing months of international scrutiny about the standards of its own exports. Inspectors in the port city of Dalian found cheese flies in containers of cattle hides between July 30 and Sept. 6, the Xinhua news agency said, citing local officials. No other details were given about the shipments. Cheese fly larva are usually found in moldy cheese or putrid meat. If ingested by humans, they can live for a period in the intestines and can cause diarrhea and vomiting.
■ AUSTRALIA
Al Gore urges careful voting
The political opposition's promise to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be the deciding issue in federal elections this year, former US vice president Al Gore said on Saturday. Canberra joined Washington in refusing to accept carbon emission reduction targets set at the 1997 UN climate meeting in Kyoto, Japan. The opposition Labor Party has vowed to ratify the protocol if it wins elections due by Jan. 19. Gore told Sky News television that global warming is ``the most important issue in the world. And I would say [Australians] ought to look very carefully at the fact that one candidate's for ratifying Kyoto and the other is not."
■ BANGLADESH
Storm sinks 12 trawlers
At least 97 fishermen aboard a dozen trawlers were feared drowned in rough seas on Saturday as a storm brewed off the southern coast, officials and witnesses said. Fishermen returning to shore reported seeing at least 12 trawlers sink at sea, local official Selim Khan said in Barisal, 175km south of the capital, Dhaka. At least 50 of the fishermen were rescued by passing boats, while about 97 others were feared drowned, he said. Coast guard patrol boats, meanwhile, were searching for the missing boats and crew, Captain Abidur Rahman said.
■ GREECE
Earthquake shakes island
A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.6 shook the Aegean Sea island of Karpathos but no damage or injuries were reported, authorities said yesterday. The Athens Geodynamic Institute said the early morning quake occurred in the sea off Karpathos in the Dodecanese island group, some 430km southeast of Athens. The country is one of the world's most earthquake-prone areas. Another two strong quakes struck the west of the country last month, but no injuries or damage were reported.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Bluetongue case discovered
Bluetongue, a virus affecting cows and other ruminant animals, has been detected for the first time, the government said. A cow was infected with the disease on a farm near Ipswich, 110km northeast of London, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said in a statement on Saturday. "This is not a confirmed outbreak unless further investigation demonstrates that disease is circulating," the environment agency said in a statement. The discovery comes as the country is trying to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.
■ UNITED STATES
Man charged in iguana theft
A man has been charged with stealing three endangered iguanas from a nature preserve in Fiji and smuggling then into the country in his prosthetic leg. Jereme James, 33, faces a single count of smuggling, according to a federal indictment returned on Friday in Los Angeles, California. The charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Prosecutors say he stole the Fiji Island banded iguanas while visiting the South Pacific island in September 2002. He then brought the reptiles into the country by hiding them in a special compartment he had constructed in his prosthetic leg, prosecutors said.
■ UNITED STATES
Man allegedly tasered
Four police officers are under investigation in Ocala, Florida, after a man accused them of using a Taser on him three times when he would not take his hand off a Koran under his shirt, a police spokesman said. Jeffrey Shields, 49, filed the complaint with the police, police spokesman Lou Biondi said on Friday. Shields said he did not want to raise his hand because he did not want to drop the Koran, but officers said they couldn't tell what he was holding. Officers were dispatched after receiving tips that an armed man was stashing drugs in a book, Biondi said. Neither drugs nor a gun were found.
■ UNITED STATES
Student arrested for `art'
A 19-year-old US college student was arrested on Friday after she walked into Boston's Logan International Airport wearing what authorities initially thought was an explosive device, police said. Star Simpson, a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told police that the device -- a circuit board measuring roughly 5cm by 15cm, with protruding wires, lights and a nine-volt battery -- was an art project. "It was an innocuous device," Major Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police said at a press conference. Authorities said she would be charged with possession of a hoax device and disorderly conduct.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
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
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed