AsiaCast

Asia Cast Monday 20th August

A Taiwanese China Airlines plane burst into flames after landing on Japan’s island of Okinawa but all one hundred and sixty five people on board are safe.

All the passengers and crew had just been evacuated when the fire broke out on the Boeing 737-800 at Naha airport.

Television pictures showed flames and smoke billowing from the plane as fire fighters doused the fuselage.

Some reports said the left engine had caught fire, although the airline company said the cause was not yet known.

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Rescue workers in China are continuing to try reach one hundred and eighty one miners trapped since Friday, but officials warn there is little hope of finding them alive.

Hundreds of soldiers, police and fellow miners are working to pump water from two flooded mineshafts at collieries in eastern Shandong Province.

Torrential rain caused a river to burst its banks, sending water cascading down an old shaft into the mine.

The incident has again thrown the spotlight on China’s bad safety record.

In a separate incident, fourteen people were killed on Sunday after a molten aluminium spill at a factory in the same province.

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Jamaica has taken a battering from Hurricane Dean, being hit by severe winds and heavy rain as the storm passed south of the island overnight.

The Category Four storm is pushing winds of up to one hundred and forty five miles per hour.

A Jamaican reporter told the British Broadcasting Corporation that many people who had chosen to remain in their homes were forced to flee; such was the severity of the storm.

Dean is now expected to pass close by the low-lying Cayman Islands, before hitting Mexico later on Monday.

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Police say eleven people were injured when they fell off the back of a truck during the shooting of Tom Cruise’s latest film in Berlin.

In Valkyrie, Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who fronted the failed attempt by a group of largely military conspirators to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July nineteen forty four.

The people fell from the truck when a side panel burst open as it drove around a corner in central Berlin on Sunday evening local time, police say.

One of them was seriously hurt and had to remain in hospital. Filming was halted after the accident.

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Rescue teams in Peru’s shattered earthquake zone are heading home as search operations were replaced by stepped-up aid efforts and security patrols against looters.

Last week’s powerful eight point zero magnitude earthquake killed at least five hundred and three people, and the final toll “could reach five hundred and forty,” civil defence officials said. Some sixteen hundred people were injured.

Most of the deaths occurred in the town of Pisco, two hundred and forty kilometres south of the capital Lima.

There, three hundred and eight people were confirmed killed, one hundred and sixty of them in the town’s church, which collapsed during mass.

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Oil prices have fallen after the likelihood of Hurricane Dean hitting key facilities in the Gulf of Mexico appeared to diminish.

The hurricane battered Jamaica on Sunday and is expected to strike the northern coast of Mexico on Wednesday.

Earlier fears that the hurricane would turn into the Gulf of Mexico, which prompted some oil firms to evacuate non-essential staff, have receded.

Although key installations in the Gulf are expected to escape unscathed, analysts warned that prices were likely to rise as the hurricane season reaches its peak next month.

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A referendum on a new constitution in Thailand has passed, final results show.

The Election Commission said fifty seven point eight percent of those taking part in the weekend vote had accepted the charter.

The military-installed government, which drew up the new constitution, welcomed the result and said it paved the way for elections later this year.

However, correspondents say the outcome of the vote reflects deep political divisions across the country.