■ THAILAND
Kids injured in slide mishap
Police were yesterday considering whether to file charges against a popular Bangkok amusement park after 28 children were injured when a water slide broke and sent them plummeting to the ground. The accident happened at Siam Park on Saturday, when one of the sections of a corkscrew water slide collapsed, leaving a 2m drop to the ground below. Four children were admitted to a hospital overnight with head injuries and broken bones, police said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Kayakers cross Tasman Sea
Two Australians who spent 62 days paddling across the Tasman Sea in a kayak arrived in New Zealand yesterday. Several thousand people crowded the shore at Ngamotu Beach to greet James Castrission, 25, and Justin Jones, 24. A fleet of Maori wakas (canoes) sailed out to welcome them. The pair had hoped to complete the 2,200km journey from Sydney by Christmas but were battered by strong winds and currents and spent days rowing in circles. In the end they traveled more than 3,300km.
■ KAZAKHSTAN
Miners presumed dead
Twenty-three miners missing after an explosion in a Kazakh mine owned by ArcelorMittal that killed seven others are believed to be dead, the Emergency Situations Ministry said yesterday. "The high temperatures and the concentration of carbon monoxide in the shaft in which the 23 miners are, completely exclude the possibility of their survival," it said. The firm's Kazakh unit said that the families of miners killed in the blast would receive compensation equivalent to five yearly salaries, Interfax news agency reported.
■ CHINA
Six miners die in fire
A fire killed at least six coal miners and the bodies of five others were pulled from a flooded shaft in the southwest, state media said yesterday, the latest casualties in the world's deadliest mining sector. Six miners were confirmed dead and one remained missing after fire broke out on Saturday in a colliery in Jiangxi Province, the agency said. Rescuers were still searching for the missing man, although chances he had survived were slim, a local government spokesman said.
■ CHINA
Baby can come home
An American couple whose adopted daughter was stuck in China because of a drunken driving charge against her new father will be allowed to bring her home, US immigration officials decided after the state's congressional delegation intervened. Andrew and Michelle Ransavage, of Hopkins, Minneapolis, adopted Mia, a special-needs child, last fall through Children's Home Society & Family Services in St. Paul. Andrew, 36, had been cited on a misdemeanor charge of drunken driving a year ago. He disclosed the arrest to the adoption agency and acknowledged he made a "huge mistake," but he passed chemical dependency and psychological exams, as well as a second home study.
■ NORTH KOREA
Disarm Pyongyang: report
South Korea's foreign ministry has given South Korean president-elect Lee Myung-bak a report urging the disarming of the North by 2010, a news report said yesterday. The ministry's report to the transition team for Lee, who takes office next month, said a concrete disarmament schedule should be established in the first half of this year, the Yonhap news agency reported. The ministry had reported it would push to "complete the nuclear dismantlement by 2010 with all nuclear materials, including plutonium, and detonators to be taken out" of the North, Yonhap said.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Satellite mission terminated
Seoul has decided to terminate the eight-year mission of its first multipurpose satellite, which controllers lost contact with last month, the space agency said yesterday. Arirang 1, launched in December 1999 to map Earth, will have its mission formally ended on Jan. 31, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute said in a statement. The state-run agency said it had made repeated but unsuccessful uplink efforts since contact was lost on Dec. 30. The satellite is programmed to use its own emergency power, which is expected to last for only one month, before gradually descending to be burnt-up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, the agency said.
■ THAILAND
By-election under way
The first by-election got underway yesterday in a constituency where voting was marred by fraud in last month's polls, while dozens of winning candidates remain under investigation. The Election Commission held the re-run in northeast Nakhon Ratchasima Province, where the victories of three candidates from the People Power Party (PPP), which won the most seats in the Dec. 23 poll, were overturned. "Everything is going OK. We are not likely to have any problems," commission secretary-general Suthiphon Thaveechaiyagarn told reporters. The three PPP candidates got yellow cards, which means there were credible reports of electoral fraud, but not enough evidence to exclude them from re-running.
■ UNITED STATES
Father rapes alleged rapist
A father sodomized his 18-year-old stepson to avenge the teenager's alleged rape of the man's eight-year-old daughter, police said. The stepson was arrested on Jan. 2 and charged with suspicion of aggravated sexual assault. Police say the father, 32, caught him assaulting his daughter, and a subsequent examination at a hospital revealed the girl had been sodomized. The man's wife posted bond for the teen's release. When he called home after getting released, the father took the call and picked him up, police said. The Arlington man drove to an abandoned house, beat his stepson with a baseball bat and sodomized him with a metal tool, police said.
■ UNITED STATES
Man charged with murders
Police charged Michel Veillette, 34, with killing his wife and their four children, who were pulled from their burning home the night before. Veillette also had been stabbed and remained in stable but serious condition on Saturday at University Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, police said. Veillette's wife, who had knife wounds and fire-related injuries, and one child were found dead inside the two-story house. Three of the couple's other children were pulled from upstairs bedrooms in the Friday night fire and died at a hospital. None of the children had been stabbed, police said. Veillette had jumped out of a second-story window and was unconscious, police said.
■ UNITED STATES
Body of baby found in marsh
An Alabama duck hunter found the body of the youngest of four children allegedly thrown from a coastal bridge by their Vietnamese father, raising hopes that the other bodies will be recovered, a sheriff said. A search for the children -- between a few months and three years old -- began on Tuesday near the mouth of Mobile Bay after prosecutors said the father, Lam Luong, confessed. About 9am on Saturday, a duck hunter found the body of an infant about 8km west of the bridge in a marshy area. "The inevitable nightmare we have feared has now been confirmed," Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said. "We believe, certainly now, that the father of these children threw these children off the Dauphin Island bridge."
■ UNITED STATES
Plane crash kills four
A small airplane crashed in a rural residential area as it headed to a landing, killing four who were aboard the aircraft, authorities said. The crew of the twin-engine Cessna 340 had radioed their intention to land at the Erie-Ottawa Regional Airport in rural northwest Ohio at about noon on Saturday, airport director Jack Stables said. Alice Orshoski, who lives in the neighborhood, said she heard an engine sputtering overhead just before the plane hit the ground. The two men and two women on board were killed, police said.
■ CANADA
Eight dead in van crash
Seven members of a high school boys' basketball team and the wife of the coach were killed when their van collided with a truck as they returned from a game. Police said the Bathurst High School basketball players, all between the ages of 15 and 18, and their coach's wife died after their van crossed the median on a slippery highway and hit the truck shortly after midnight on Saturday. "The sudden loss of eight people in this unthinkable accident shocked the nation and all Canadians join you in mourning their passing,'' Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a letter of condolence to the school's principal.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees