■ THAILAND
Kids injured in slide mishap
Police were yesterday considering whether to file charges against a popular Bangkok amusement park after 28 children were injured when a water slide broke and sent them plummeting to the ground. The accident happened at Siam Park on Saturday, when one of the sections of a corkscrew water slide collapsed, leaving a 2m drop to the ground below. Four children were admitted to a hospital overnight with head injuries and broken bones, police said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Kayakers cross Tasman Sea
Two Australians who spent 62 days paddling across the Tasman Sea in a kayak arrived in New Zealand yesterday. Several thousand people crowded the shore at Ngamotu Beach to greet James Castrission, 25, and Justin Jones, 24. A fleet of Maori wakas (canoes) sailed out to welcome them. The pair had hoped to complete the 2,200km journey from Sydney by Christmas but were battered by strong winds and currents and spent days rowing in circles. In the end they traveled more than 3,300km.
■ KAZAKHSTAN
Miners presumed dead
Twenty-three miners missing after an explosion in a Kazakh mine owned by ArcelorMittal that killed seven others are believed to be dead, the Emergency Situations Ministry said yesterday. "The high temperatures and the concentration of carbon monoxide in the shaft in which the 23 miners are, completely exclude the possibility of their survival," it said. The firm's Kazakh unit said that the families of miners killed in the blast would receive compensation equivalent to five yearly salaries, Interfax news agency reported.
■ CHINA
Six miners die in fire
A fire killed at least six coal miners and the bodies of five others were pulled from a flooded shaft in the southwest, state media said yesterday, the latest casualties in the world's deadliest mining sector. Six miners were confirmed dead and one remained missing after fire broke out on Saturday in a colliery in Jiangxi Province, the agency said. Rescuers were still searching for the missing man, although chances he had survived were slim, a local government spokesman said.
■ CHINA
Baby can come home
An American couple whose adopted daughter was stuck in China because of a drunken driving charge against her new father will be allowed to bring her home, US immigration officials decided after the state's congressional delegation intervened. Andrew and Michelle Ransavage, of Hopkins, Minneapolis, adopted Mia, a special-needs child, last fall through Children's Home Society & Family Services in St. Paul. Andrew, 36, had been cited on a misdemeanor charge of drunken driving a year ago. He disclosed the arrest to the adoption agency and acknowledged he made a "huge mistake," but he passed chemical dependency and psychological exams, as well as a second home study.
■ NORTH KOREA
Disarm Pyongyang: report
South Korea's foreign ministry has given South Korean president-elect Lee Myung-bak a report urging the disarming of the North by 2010, a news report said yesterday. The ministry's report to the transition team for Lee, who takes office next month, said a concrete disarmament schedule should be established in the first half of this year, the Yonhap news agency reported. The ministry had reported it would push to "complete the nuclear dismantlement by 2010 with all nuclear materials, including plutonium, and detonators to be taken out" of the North, Yonhap said.
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