■INDIA
Bus fire kills 63
Police say the death toll after a speeding bus caught fire in the north has risen to 63. Senior police official Navneet Kumar said yesterday that the dead from Tuesday’s accident include eight children. Police say the 52-seat bus was crammed with more than 100 people when it caught fire, overturned and slid for several hundred meters down a highway. The accident happened near the town of Firozabad, 200km southwest of Lucknow.
■SOUTH KOREA
Sailors jailed for oil spill
A court yesterday jailed the Indian captain and chief officer of a Hong Kong supertanker after ruling they were partly to blame for the country’s worst oil spill, court officials said. The appeal court, overturning a lower court ruling, found the Hebei Spirit’s owner and top officers partly to blame for the spillage on Dec. 7 last year that fouled kilometers of beaches. Captain Jasprit Chawla was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 20 million won (US$14,000) while chief officer Syam Chetan was sentenced to eight months and fined 10 million won, the officials said.
■INDONESIA
Troops sent to Maluku
Hundreds of troops were deployed to a tense province in the Maluku islands after sectarian violence left two churches and 50 other buildings in flames, police said yesterday. Local police chief Brigadier General Muji Waluyo said the violence erupted on Tuesday in Masohi, a town on Seram island in Central Maluku Province, after a Christian elementary schoolteacher made a comment about religion that offended a Muslim student. He complained to his parents, and within hours mobs were throwing stones at each other and torching churches, houses and other buildings.
■HONG KONG
‘Peace’ panda bites keeper
An investigation was under way yesterday into why a giant panda bit the female keeper who had been looking after him for seven years. The keeper was hospitalized after being bitten on the leg by giant panda An-An (安安), whose name means “Peace” in Chinese, in his enclosure at the Ocean Park theme park in Hong Kong on Nov. 30. The attack by the 22-year-old panda only came to light after a video of it taken with a mobile phone camera by a park visitor was circulated on the Internet video channel YouTube. Footage of the incident shows the 100kg panda rushing back to its enclosure while the park worker, who has not been identified, lies on the ground with an injured left leg. The woman is understood to have breached safety protocols by refilling a supply of bamboo while the panda was out of its den.
RSS