ALMATY (Kazakhstan): Twelve people died and dozens were injured yesterday when a passenger plane carrying 100 people crashed shortly after takeoff from Kazakhstan’s largest city and slammed into a house, officials said. A video released by the Central Asian country’s emergencies committee showed the plane operated by budget carrier Bek
MANILA: The death toll from Typhoon Phanfone’s battering of the Philippines on Christmas Day has risen to 28, and will likely climb further, authorities said yesterday. The storm, with wind gusts of up to 200km per hour, swept across remote villages and popular tourist destinations in the central Philippines on
MANILA: Tourists on the popular Philippine holiday island of Boracay were stranded yesterday after a typhoon swept across on Christmas Day, killing at least 16 people in other parts of the country. Typhoon Phanfone, with wind gusts reaching 200 kilometres an hour, tore roofs off houses and toppled electric posts
SINGAPORE: Skywatchers from Saudi Arabia and Oman to India and Singapore were treated to a rare “ring of fire” solar eclipse yesterday. Annular eclipses occur when the Moon is not close enough to the Earth to completely obscure the Sun, leaving a thin ring of the solar disc visible. While
South Korean black comedy “Parasite” will battle France’s “Les Miserables” and Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s “Pain and Glory” for the best international film Oscar, in a shortlist announced recently. The films were among 10 revealed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, from which five nominees will be
A quarter-century after releasing her holiday classic that’s become one of the season’s love-to-hate, hate-to-love clichés, Mariah Carey has finally pushed “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to top the charts for the first time. “We did it,” the diva said in a tweet that featured several emojis, including
SYDNEY: Australia this week experienced its hottest day on record and the heatwave is expected to worsen, exacerbating an already unprecedented bushfire season, authorities said yesterday. The average nationwide temperatures of 40.9 degrees Celsius on Tuesday beat the previous record of 40.3 degrees Celsius in January 2013, the Bureau of
JAKARTA: Huge chunks of an Indonesian volcano litter the seabed after its eruption and subsequent collapse last year sparked a deadly tsunami, according to new research. The marine survey imagery shows parts of the strait between Java and Sumatra islands covered with triangular-shaped boulders from the Anak Krakatau volcano, some
TOKYO: A Tokyo court yesterday awarded 3.3 million yen in damages to journalist Shiori Ito, who accused a former TV reporter of rape in one of the most high-profile cases of the #MeToo movement in Japan. The civil case made headlines in Japan and abroad, as it is rare for
VIENNA: Vienna’s prestigious ballet academy is endangering children’s well-being including by encouraging them to smoke to stay slim, an Austrian commission probing abuse claims said Tuesday. The scandal broke in April when a media report accused the academy at Vienna’s renowned State Opera of inflicting serious physical and mental abuse