■VIETNAM
US student arrested
Local authorities have arrested a US student, who is a member the Democratic Party of Vietnam (DPV), while traveling to the country with a nonprofit humanitarian group to do charity work, a party official confirmed yesterday. “This arrest is unlawful,” Nguyen Si Binh, chairman of the US-based DPV, said by telephone. The DPV said on its Web site that Vo Tan Huan, 26, a Vietnamese-American student of pharmacy at the University of Tennessee, traveled with Project Vietnam, a US-based nonprofit humanitarian group, to do charity work at Children’s Hospital II and was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City last Tuesday. The DPV has called on the US State Department to request the government of Vietnam immediately intervene and release Huan.
■VIETNAM
Swine flu closes school
An official says a school in the south has closed after 26 teachers and students tested positive for swine flu. Tuong Nguyen Su, head of personnel at Ngo Thoi Nhiem High School in Ho Chi Minh City, says 24 students and two teachers have the virus. Su said the school would remain closed for at least a week. He said more than 100 students and about 40 teachers were quarantined there.
■SOUTH KOREA
Hospital switched babies
A court has ordered a hospital to pay a mother 70 million won (US$56,000) in damages after it mistakenly gave her the wrong baby 16 years ago. The unidentified woman gave birth at the hospital in Guri, a satellite city west of Seoul, in 1992 but a nurse mistook another baby for her own daughter. The mother began suspecting the child was not her own last July when her blood type turned out to be type A. She and her husband were both type B. A genetic test proved the daughter was biologically unrelated. Judge Lee Joon-Ho, in a ruling on Sunday quoted by local media yesterday, said the hospital failed to take adequate care of the newborn babies and return each one to the right parents. The biological daughter has not yet been located, the reports said.
■CHINA
Hundreds flee toxic leak
More than 1,000 people fled their homes and businesses and four factory workers were sent to the hospital after a chemical leak at a shoe factory in Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province over the weekend, a report on the Wenzhou government Web site said yesterday. Twenty tonnes of the chemical styrene leaked from containers on Sunday at Hongchang Shoe Materials Co Ltd, it said. The four workers had nose, eye and throat irritation after coming into contact with the carcinogenic liquid chemical used to make rubber and plastic, the report said.
RSS