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PHOTO: AP

■ AFGHANISTAN

Danish soldier wounded

A Danish soldier serving with a NATO-led force was wounded on Saturday when his vehicle was damaged by the explosion of a roadside bomb or mine, military officials said in a statement. “Saturday at noon local time a patrol hit a mine or a homemade bomb in Helmand Province,” leaving the Danish soldier with a fractured foot, the statement said. Most NATO troops in Helmand are British but Denmark also has 550 soldiers in the troubled southern province under British command.



■ CHINA

Rain pummels Guangdong

The heaviest rainstorms in 50 years drenched parts of Guangdong Province over the past two days, killing at least one student and causing widespread flooding, local media reported yesterday. The Guangzhou Daily reported that one primary school student died after being swept away by a flood on Saturday in Maoming. It said another primary school student and a high school student were missing. The newspaper said more than 6,500 people had to be evacuated from their homes. Torrential rains have affected the province over the past two weeks, with rainfall in some areas measuring more than 400mm in just the past two days, the paper reported.



■ INDONESIA

Quake registers 6.1

An earthquake registering 6.1 on the Richter scale struck the eastern islands yesterday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, the country’s seismological agency said. The quake struck at 5:23am with an epicenter about 68km northeast of Ruteng on Flores Island, the National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said.



■ PHILIPPINES

Militiamen kill guerrillas

Pro-government militiamen killed three communist guerrillas when the rebels attacked their outpost in the north, a military official said yesterday. One militiaman was also wounded in the clash with the communist New People’s Army (NPA) in Sallapadan town before dawn on Saturday, military spokesman Major Rosendo Armas said. The NPA band attacked the outpost but the outnumbered militiamen repulsed them in the latest of a series of bloody clashes in the northernmost provinces of the island of Luzon, Armas said. Helicopter gunships and soldiers have been dispatched to hunt down the remaining attackers, he said. Meanwhile, NPA guerrillas overran a militia outpost on Mindanao also on Saturday, confiscating the 14 rifles of the militiamen but leaving them unharmed, a local official said.



■ CHINA

Rocks derail freight train

One railway worker was killed and a freight train driver was seriously injured when the train derailed after being hit by falling mountain rocks yesterday morning in Sichuan Province, state media reported yesterday. The train driver was hospitalized in critical condition, Xinhua news agency quoted an official of the Chengdu railway administration as saying. The accident happened at around 2:40am at the Jintang County, more than 80km northeast of Chengdu. The train’s locomotive and following 10 cargo cars derailed, Xinhua said. The official who declined to give his name said continuous rains in recent days had preceded the rock slide. The accident led to the closure of the 386km railway section between Dazhou in Sichuan and Chengdu, the provincial capital, Xinhua reported.



■ UKRAINE

Explosion rips through mine

Thirty-seven people were missing yesterday after an explosion ripped through a coal mine, an emergency official said. “The fate of 37 people who were in the mine when the explosion took place at around 5am local time remains unknown,” said Andriy Bondarenko, the regional head of the Emergency Situations Ministry. Three people on the surface were injured by the blast at the Karl Marx mine in the town of Yenakiyevo in the coal-rich Donetsk region, Bondarenko said. The mine was closed down on Saturday because of safety violations and only a skeletal staff was working at the time of the blast, he said.



■ SPAIN

Blast damages news press

An explosion damaged the printing facilities of a Basque newspaper as people worked inside early yesterday, but no one was injured, the Interior Ministry said. An apparent bomb detonated at the presses of El Correo near the northern port city of Bilbao at about 3am yesterday, a regional ministry spokesman said on condition of anonymity. No warning was received and the area has been cordoned off by Basque regional police. The Web site of El Correo blamed the explosion on the violent Basque separatist group ETA, and said around 50 people were preparing yesterday’s paper when the explosion blasted a 40m² hole in a concrete wall. “No type of warning was given, and it is through sheer luck that a tragedy was averted,” the paper said on its Web site. Photographs published on the Web site show considerable damage to the building.



■ GAZA STRIP

Israeli troops kill militant

A Palestinian medical official says Israeli troops have killed a Hamas militant along the Gaza-Israel border. Moaiya Hassanain of the Gaza Health Ministry says an Israeli tank killed the militant near Gaza City. Hamas confirms the man was a member of the group, and says two of his comrades were wounded. The Israeli military says the gunman was planting a bomb along the border late on Saturday when troops spotted him and opened fire.



■ TURKEY

Planes bomb rebels in Iraq

Warplanes bombed separatist Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq late on Saturday, the army said in a statement. The raid against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party began at 10:30pm and targeted the Zap area, close to the border with Iraq, said the brief statement on the general staff’s Internet site. Aided by US intelligence, the country has carried out several air strikes against rebels in the mountainous enclave since mid-December under a one-year parliamentary authorization for such action that expires in October.



■ SOMALIA

Foreign prospectors held

Authorities in the breakaway region of Somaliland on Saturday detained a Chinese national and a Yemeni for prospecting minerals without permission, an official said. The region’s Interior Minister Abdullahi Osmael Ali said the pair were arrested in Las Qorey district in the Eastern Sanag region. The area is believed to be rich in zinc. “The two men were confirmed to be Chinese and Yemeni nationals. They were traveling in Somaliland without permission,” he said. They were transferred to the region’s capital Hargeisa where they were detained. Somaliland, which broke away from Somalia five months after the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, is fiercely protective of its territory although the UN and African Union have refused to recognize its independence.



■ MEXICO

Nude cyclists hit the city

Hundreds of naked cyclists rode through the streets of Mexico City on Saturday to demand respect from drivers in a city choked with some 4 million vehicles. More than 500 men and women, half of them nude, pedaled along the city’s historic Reforma Avenue to the vast Zocalo Square, chanting: “Save your planet, use a bicycle!” Some had “emission-free vehicle” painted on their backs. “We’re riding nude to see if this way they’ll see us, so they don’t run over any more of us,” said student Alejandro Hernandez, standing naked before the ride.



■ MEXICO

Cuban migrants detained

The navy said it detained 34 Cuban migrants who were in a yacht off Cancun’s coast. Lieutenant Wilberth Vargas said navy personnel found 28 men, four women and two children on Friday during a routine patrol near the resort. Vargas said the migrants told authorities they left Cuba on a makeshift boat and while at sea were spotted by two men in a yacht who offered to take them to the US. Vargas did not say if the two men sailing the yacht had been arrested.



■ UNITED STATES

Regatta competitor missing

The Coast Guard was searching for one more regatta competitor in the Gulf of Mexico after a six-person boat was found capsized and five were rescued by a helicopter crew. The emergency contact person for the 11.6m Cynthia Woods called the Coast Guard after communication with the boat was lost around midnight on Friday and the boat missed an 8am radio check, authorities said. The boat was competing in the 40th annual Regata de Amigos. The race, which covers 610 nautical miles (1,130km) from Galveston to Veracruz, Mexico, started on Friday and continues into this week. The crew included four college students and two safety officers, Texas A&M at Galveston said in a news release on Saturday.



■ PERU

Fujimori recovering

Former president Alberto Fujimori is recovering after having a cancerous lesion removed from his tongue, his doctor said on Saturday. Dr Alejandro Aguinaga said a study conducted on the removed lesion showed it was cancerous, not precancerous as doctors had initially said. Fujimori is recovering well following Thursday’s surgery, Aguinaga said. The operation forced the suspension of the former president’s trial on alleged human rights abuses. The trial is scheduled to resume on Wednesday. The 69-year-old Fujimori is charged with allowing a military death squad to carry out kidnappings and murders of suspected rebel collaborators in the early 1990s.



■ CHILE

Aircraft goes missing

Authorities were searching for a small airplane carrying 10 people that went missing after taking off from an airport in the south. The Cessna 208 Caravan took off on Saturday from the Puerto Montt airport, 1,000km south of Santiago, en route to the southern town of La Junta in Aysen region, Air Force General Hugo Pena said. The plane, which was carrying nine passengers and a pilot, was to have arrived in La Junta at 3pm and was declared missing four hours later, Pena said. It took off under poor weather conditions.
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