■ CHINA
Coal mine fire traps 15
A fire at a coal mine has trapped 15 workers and has been burning since Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency said. Rescuers at the Shanxi Province mine have found three bodies, though 18 people managed to escape, the report yesterday said. "It is not clear whether the 15 trapped miners are still alive or not, and the fire is yet to be quenched," it quoted Wang Xingui, deputy head of the rescue team, as saying. The country's coal industry is the deadliest in the world, with 2,163 miners killed in 1,320 accidents in the first seven months of this year.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Roh mulls walk over border
President Roh Moo-Hyun is considering "walking across" the heavily-fortified border to North Korea for a summit early next month, a report said yesterday. Chosun Ilbo, the largest circulation daily said. However, the idea had sparked concerns about the safety of the head of state. Roh is to visit the North by car via the truce border village of Panmunjeon from Oct. 2 to Oct. 4 for peace talks with the North's leader Kim Jong-il -- only the second inter-Korean summit in the six decades since the peninsula was divided. Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, traveled to the North by air for the first-ever peace summit with Kim in 2000. "Using an overland route for this summit unlike the first one, we're considering showing the president walking across the border line, the symbol of the divided Korea," an unnamed government official told Chosun. The idea, if realized, would allow Roh to drop off his car near the inter-Korean military demarcation line and walk across with his staff, the paper said.
■ INDIA
Man murdered priest
A Hindu man serving a life sentence for burning alive an Australian Christian missionary and his two sons was given another jail term on Saturday for murdering a Catholic priest. Dara Singh is serving a life term in Orissa state for the January 1999 killings of Graham Staines and his two sons, aged eight and 10. On Saturday, a court handed Singh and three others life terms for battering to death 35-year-old Arul Doss, a priest, in September 1999, a court official said. Seventeen others suspected of involvement in the hate crime were set free for lack of evidence, the official said.
■ MALAYSIA
Fees proposed for drivers
Authorities in the nation's biggest city plan to impose a fee on motorists as part of efforts to reduce traffic congestion in downtown areas, a report said yesterday. Two million vehicles ply Kuala Lumpur's streets daily and the city has recorded traffic growth of 10 percent to 15 percent each year, Mayor Abdul Hakim Borhan was quoted by national news agency Bernama as saying on a visit to Stockholm, Sweden. Under the system, vehicles will have their license plates recorded when they enter certain streets, and owners will be required to pay the fee at a bank or convenience store. Drivers who don't pay will be fined, the report said.
■ CHINA
Checks of US hides intensify
Inspectors in the northeast have stepped up checks on cattle hides imported from the US after finding live flies in six shipments, state media said yesterday. The move appeared to be part of Beijing's efforts to show that products from other countries also have quality problems after facing months of international scrutiny about the standards of its own exports. Inspectors in the port city of Dalian found cheese flies in containers of cattle hides between July 30 and Sept. 6, the Xinhua news agency said, citing local officials. No other details were given about the shipments. Cheese fly larva are usually found in moldy cheese or putrid meat. If ingested by humans, they can live for a period in the intestines and can cause diarrhea and vomiting.
■ AUSTRALIA
Al Gore urges careful voting
The political opposition's promise to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be the deciding issue in federal elections this year, former US vice president Al Gore said on Saturday. Canberra joined Washington in refusing to accept carbon emission reduction targets set at the 1997 UN climate meeting in Kyoto, Japan. The opposition Labor Party has vowed to ratify the protocol if it wins elections due by Jan. 19. Gore told Sky News television that global warming is ``the most important issue in the world. And I would say [Australians] ought to look very carefully at the fact that one candidate's for ratifying Kyoto and the other is not."
■ BANGLADESH
Storm sinks 12 trawlers
At least 97 fishermen aboard a dozen trawlers were feared drowned in rough seas on Saturday as a storm brewed off the southern coast, officials and witnesses said. Fishermen returning to shore reported seeing at least 12 trawlers sink at sea, local official Selim Khan said in Barisal, 175km south of the capital, Dhaka. At least 50 of the fishermen were rescued by passing boats, while about 97 others were feared drowned, he said. Coast guard patrol boats, meanwhile, were searching for the missing boats and crew, Captain Abidur Rahman said.
■ GREECE
Earthquake shakes island
A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.6 shook the Aegean Sea island of Karpathos but no damage or injuries were reported, authorities said yesterday. The Athens Geodynamic Institute said the early morning quake occurred in the sea off Karpathos in the Dodecanese island group, some 430km southeast of Athens. The country is one of the world's most earthquake-prone areas. Another two strong quakes struck the west of the country last month, but no injuries or damage were reported.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Bluetongue case discovered
Bluetongue, a virus affecting cows and other ruminant animals, has been detected for the first time, the government said. A cow was infected with the disease on a farm near Ipswich, 110km northeast of London, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said in a statement on Saturday. "This is not a confirmed outbreak unless further investigation demonstrates that disease is circulating," the environment agency said in a statement. The discovery comes as the country is trying to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.
■ UNITED STATES
Man charged in iguana theft
A man has been charged with stealing three endangered iguanas from a nature preserve in Fiji and smuggling then into the country in his prosthetic leg. Jereme James, 33, faces a single count of smuggling, according to a federal indictment returned on Friday in Los Angeles, California. The charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Prosecutors say he stole the Fiji Island banded iguanas while visiting the South Pacific island in September 2002. He then brought the reptiles into the country by hiding them in a special compartment he had constructed in his prosthetic leg, prosecutors said.
■ UNITED STATES
Man allegedly tasered
Four police officers are under investigation in Ocala, Florida, after a man accused them of using a Taser on him three times when he would not take his hand off a Koran under his shirt, a police spokesman said. Jeffrey Shields, 49, filed the complaint with the police, police spokesman Lou Biondi said on Friday. Shields said he did not want to raise his hand because he did not want to drop the Koran, but officers said they couldn't tell what he was holding. Officers were dispatched after receiving tips that an armed man was stashing drugs in a book, Biondi said. Neither drugs nor a gun were found.
■ UNITED STATES
Student arrested for `art'
A 19-year-old US college student was arrested on Friday after she walked into Boston's Logan International Airport wearing what authorities initially thought was an explosive device, police said. Star Simpson, a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told police that the device -- a circuit board measuring roughly 5cm by 15cm, with protruding wires, lights and a nine-volt battery -- was an art project. "It was an innocuous device," Major Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police said at a press conference. Authorities said she would be charged with possession of a hoax device and disorderly conduct.
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
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