190 hurt in school fire drill in China
SHANGHAI • A fire drill at a school in China left more than 190 people injured, nine critically, after participants inhaled smoke used to simulate accident conditions.
Over 400 students at the middle school in Gansu province's Tianshui city took part in the combined fire and air raid drill last Friday when the artificially generated smoke surged out of control, the official Xinhua news agency reported yesterday. Many students began to cough and vomit after inhaling the smoke, the report quoted the local government as saying.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
KL-Jakarta deradicalisation tie-up
PUTRAJAYA • Malaysia and Indonesia will cooperate on a deradicalisation programme, with the former's Home Ministry hosting an international workshop on the process next year, said a statement issued by the office of Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. The workshop - which will invite representatives of other countries such as Britain, the United States and Australia - is expected to be held in January and will come up with a standard operating procedure on handling radicalisation, the Bernama news agency reported on Saturday.
Leader of Mindanao sultanate dies
MANILA • The leader of a sultanate in Mindanao whose followers invaded Malaysia's Sabah state in 2013 and sparked a deadly security crisis has died of kidney failure.
Esmail Kiram II, 76, died late on Saturday at a hospital in the southern Philippine city of Zamboanga, according to a family spokesman, the Associated Press reported. About 200 people - including armed militants - from Sulu in the southern Philippines sailed to Kampung Tanduo in eastern Sabah on Feb 9, 2013, to press ancestral claims on the land. Dozens of people were killed in a stand-off with Malaysian troops.
Left-hand-drive plans in Myanmar
YANGON • Myanmar plans to make left-hand-drive cars compulsory, state media reported yesterday, causing concern in a country where the vast majority of vehicles remain right-hand-drive despite cars driving on the right. An estimated 90 per cent of the vehicles are right-hand-drive, primarily because most of the affordable cars available and brought in by importers are second-hand vehicles from Japan.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
