■CHINA
Parma hits Hainan
Tropical Storm Parma made landfall on Hainan island, after moving away from the Philippines where it crossed Luzon three times leaving almost 200 people dead. Parma reached the coast at about 10am yesterday, Xinhua news agency said. The storm was forecast to head toward Vietnam today, crossing the Vietnamese coast south of Hanoi after 7pm. The death toll in the Philippines rose to 199 as the bodies of more victims drowned in floods or buried by landslides were discovered. Fifty people remain missing, while about 92,000 are in evacuation centers, the National Disaster Coordinating Council said yesterday.
■AUSTRALIA
Afghans to be resettled
The government will resettle 42 Afghan men who were aboard a boat that had been intercepted by authorities when someone on board deliberately set off an explosion, killing five asylum seekers, an official said yesterday. The blast occurred aboard the wooden boat on April 16, a day after it had been intercepted about 600km northwest of Broome. Police said earlier this month that fuel was deliberately spilled across the deck of the boat and ignited, but that there was not enough evidence to charge any individual passenger. The government determined that the survivors were genuine refugees “because of the situation in Afghanistan and the potential threat to their lives,” Immigration Minister Chris Evans told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio yesterday.
■CHINA
Six sentenced for riots
Six people were sentenced to death yesterday for murder and other crimes committed during riots that killed nearly 200 people in Xinjiang in July and another defendant received life in prison. The cases were the first directly connected to the riots. State media did not immediately give any other details on the sentences. Police have said hundreds were detained following the rioting in Urumqi, which the government says killed 197 people and injured more than 1,700.
■AUSTRALIA
And twins make 11
A woman who made headlines by falling pregnant with quadruplets — twice — has added to her brood by delivering twins, reports said yesterday. Dale Chalk, 31, and husband Darren are now the proud parents of 11 children under the age of seven. “We’d love to have more children, but medically, that’s it,” Darren told the Courier-Mail. “We’d have to buy a bigger bus!” The first set — two boys and two girls — were born in August 2004. Dale became pregnant with her second set of quads in 2005. The babies were delivered in October of that year but only three survived. The couple also have a six-year-old daughter and another girl born in 2007. They are understood to have used a low-grade infertility treatment for the multiple births.
■MYANMAR
Hair used to fix bridge
Proceeds from hair donated by women worth 200 million kyat (US$180,000) have been used to repair bridges leading to one of the country’s most sacred pagodas, media reports said on Sunday. Some 100,000 women donated 2,400kg of hair to fund the rebuilding of 16 bridges along a 26km stretch of road leading in to Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park, home to the Alaungdaw Kathapa Pagoda, the Myanmar Times reported. So far, 11 out of 16 bridges have been repaired and the rest are expected to be completed by early next year, the pagoda’s abbot Sayadaw Damadaya Ashin Waryamarnanda told the newspaper.
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