■ 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.
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