PHILIPPINES
Firecrackers injure hundreds
An official said more than 200 people have been injured by illegally huge firecrackers and celebratory gunfire despite a government scare campaign against reckless holiday revelries. Health Assistant Secretary Enrique Tayag said yesterday that most of those hurt were children. Stray bullets wounded eight people and 197 were injured by powerful firecrackers between Dec. 21 and Friday. Officials fear the number of injuries might rise as superstitious people bid goodbye to a year of natural disasters and economic uncertainties. Desperate to halt the violent tradition, officials have warned revelers they risk amputations if they are hurt lighting up huge firecrackers.
PHILIPPINES
Minister heads to Syria
The foreign minister will fly to Syria to help speed up the repatriation of its citizens from the strife-torn country, a statement said yesterday. Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario was to depart on a Qatar Airways flight to Damascus late yesterday to make sure that the repatriation of it citizens “can be made as secure as possible,” the ministry said in a statement. “During this visit to Syria, we will seek the cooperation and assistance of Syrian officials in ensuring the safety of our people there,” del Rosario was quoted as saying in the statement.
THAILAND
Funeral trip kills mourners
Twelve mourners were killed when their packed pickup truck collided with a passenger bus as they traveled to the funeral of a relative in the northeast, police said yesterday. Ten women and two men, many of whom were sitting in the open-top rear of the truck, were killed instantly in the smash in Buriram province. Four other people were injured. Colonel Pongsak Suk-im, commander of the local Nangrong district police, said the early morning collision happened when the truck pulled onto a main road in front of a long-distance bus from Bangkok. The accident came during the most dangerous week of the year on Thailand’s roads. Annual fatalities from vehicle crashes during the New Year period regularly run into the hundreds, due to a combination of the large number of people on the roads and drunk driving.
AUSTRALIA
Woman tried to cut off leg
A grandmother who survived three days trapped by her overturned car after a road accident on Christmas Day had become so desperate to escape she considered amputating her leg, police said. With her mobile phone battery dying, Deborah McKnight, who is in her mid-40s, was unable to reach emergency help after her car rolled over an embankment on an isolated country road last Sunday. “She told me she tried to cut her leg off but she couldn’t get through the bone,” daughter Ebony told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on Friday. “I don’t know what she used. I felt sick when she told me that.” McKnight had been driving near Batlow when she told police she swerved to miss a kangaroo and lost control of her car which careered through a guard rail and tumbled down a cliff. The Holden Commodore landed on its roof at the foot of a tree and McKnight found herself thrown so she was partly outside the vehicle, with her left leg crushed between its roof and the ground. The grandmother was finally found when a teenager walking to a neighbor’s property late on Wednesday afternoon heard her moans and found the wreck which was still holding childrens’ Christmas presents.
RUSSIA
Nuclear sub fire put out
Firefighters on Friday put out flames on a nuclear submarine undergoing repairs near Norway after almost a day-long blaze that raised concerns about the security of the nation’s ageing fleet. The rubberized coating on the Delta IV-class submarine Yekaterinburg caught fire on Thursday at a dock in the Murmansk region. “The fire has been liquidated. There is no burning,” Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu told a meeting of officials. The ministry had repeatedly insisted there were no signs of above normal radiation in the area and Shoigu said radiation monitoring would revert to normal. A military source quoted by local news agencies said the Yekaterinburg would now be taken in for repairs that had initially been scheduled for next year.
ARGENTINA
Police search for attacker
Police yesterday searched for the attacker of an Australian tourist who was found alive three days after disappearing on a nature trail. Emma Kelly, 23, is recovering and out of danger, an Argentine friend said. She was found dehydrated and disoriented on Thursday and with obvious signs of being attacked after going hiking in the scenic “Cajon del Azul” canyon near El Bolson, a town in the southern Andean foothills. Kelly was flown by helicopter to a local hospital and was recovering said Bruno Meister, who lives in El Bolson with another Australian, a close friend of the injured woman.Police also responded quickly to an attack on two French tourists who went missing while hiking on another nature trail, about 2,000km to the north, in the Salta region in July. The women were found raped and shot to death, and three suspects were detained.
UNITED KINGDOM
Weather data released
Last year was the second-warmest on record in the country, the Met Office national weather service said yesterday, a marked swing from a chilly 2010. Provisional figures showed that the average temperature throughout the year was 9.62oC. The record high was recorded in 2006, which notched an average temperature of 9.73oC. All except one of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997 and the nation’s top seven warmest years all happened over the past decade. Scotland suffered its wettest year on record last year, with 1,859.5mm of rain, beating the previous record set in 1990. The warmest temperature recorded last year was 33.1oC on June 27 at Gravesend in southeast England. The coldest was minus-13oC at Altnaharra in Scotland on Jan. 8.
RUSSIA
Morgue caviar seized
Even people who think caviar is to die for might lose their appetite when it’s stored in a hospital morgue, but that is where St Petersburg police found a huge stash of the delicacy this week — 175kg stored in the refrigerated space where cadavers are kept. A morgue employee and a businessman were arrested after the Wednesday discovery, but police said on Friday that the matter was still being investigated. The arrested men said the caviar was to be a treat for hospital employees at a New Year’s party. Most of the red caviar was from salmon, but 38kg of the stash was black caviar from sturgeon, an endangered fish. Amid heavy restrictions on sturgeon fishing, black caviar is increasingly produced and sold illegally. In the run-up to New Year’s, one of Russia’s most lavishly festive holidays, police have made a series of other seizures of caviar.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not