The Korea Herald

Dead blackbirds fall again in Arkansas town

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Thousands of dead blackbirds rained down on a town in central Arkansas last New Year's Eve after revelers set off fireworks that spooked them from their roost, and officials were reporting a similar occurrence Saturday as 2012 approached.Police in Beebe said dozens of

Jan. 2, 2012

Dead blackbirds fall again in Arkansas town

Child sacrificed, liver offered to gods: Indian police

RAIPUR, India (AFP) - A seven-year-old Indian girl was murdered in a tribal sacrifice and her liver offered to the gods to improve crop growth, police in the central state of Chhattisgarh said on Sunday. File illustration photo shows villagers of Dantewada District in the central state of Chhattisga

Jan. 2, 2012

Child sacrificed, liver offered to gods: Indian police

Report: Toxic homebrew kills 16 in India

NEW DELHI (AP) _ An official says at least 16 people have died after drinking a toxic home-brewed liquor over the weekend in southern India.Gaurav Uppal, a top district administrator, says another 24 poor villagers are being treated in hospitals in the Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh state. An In

Jan. 2, 2012

Report: Toxic homebrew kills 16 in India

World rings in 2012, bids adieu to a tough year

PARIS (AP) ― With glittering fireworks and celebrations from New Zealand to Times Square, the world eagerly welcomed a new year and hope for a better future Saturday, saying goodbye to a year of hurricanes, tsunamis and economic turmoil that many would rather forget.Revelers in Australia, Asia, Europe and the South Pacific island nation of Samoa, which jumped across the international dateline to be first to celebrate, welcomed 2012 with booming pyrotechnic displays. Fireworks soared and sparked

Jan. 1, 2012

World rings in 2012, bids adieu to a tough year

Afghan child bride tortured by in-laws

KABUL (AFP) ― An Afghan child bride Saturday spoke of how she was tortured by her mother-in-law who locked her in a toilet for six months, beat her, pulled out her fingernails and burned her with cigarettes.Sahar Gul, 15, is recovering in hospital in Kabul, her face bruised and swollen, her skin still bearing the marks of her ordeal, barely able to speak.Police have said she was locked up when she defied her in-laws who tried to force her into prostitution. Her brother had sold her to her husban

Jan. 1, 2012

Syria’s rival opposition groups unite against Assad

BEIRUT (AP) ― Syria’s two largest opposition groups signed an agreement on setting up a democracy if President Bashar Assad’s autocratic regime falls, opposition figures said Saturday.The move is so far the most serious by the fractured opposition to unite against the regime and shows that Assad’s opponents will accept nothing less than his departure from power.Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the Syrian National Council, and Haytham Manna of the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syr

Jan. 1, 2012

Divided U.N. council welcomes new members

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) -- Five new countries on Sunday join a U.N. Security Council driven by one of the biggest international splits in years on how to handle the Arab Spring uprisings.Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Morocco, Pakistan and Togo start two year terms on the council which has been wounded by air strikes in Libya and is battling over President Bashar Assad’s deadly crackdown in Syria. Growing tensions around Iran add to the nerves on the 15-member body.“It is like the Cold War,” said one Weste

Jan. 1, 2012

Iran backs off threat to close oil route

TEHRAN (AP) ― Talk of blocking the strategic oil route through the Strait of Hormuz is a discussion of the past, a commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Saturday in comments that seemed to back away from an earlier threat. But he said Iran had other, unspecified strategies for reacting to any Western aggression.“Discourse about closing the Strait of Hormuz belongs to five years ago. Today’s debate in the Islamic Republic of Iran contains new layers and the time has not come to raise it,”

Jan. 1, 2012

Man dies from bird flu in China

BEIJING (AFP) ― A bus driver in southern China who contracted the bird flu virus died Saturday, health authorities said, in the nation’s first reported human case of the deadly disease in 18 months.The man, surnamed Chen, died in Shenzhen ― a boomtown that borders Hong Kong where thousands of chickens have already been culled after three birds tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus in mid-December.He developed a fever on Dec. 21 and was taken to hospital four days later, and diagnose

Jan. 1, 2012

NASA probe enters lunar orbit

PASADENA, California (AP) ― A NASA spacecraft fired its engine and slipped into orbit around the moon Saturday in the first of two back-to-back arrivals over the New Year’s weekend.Ground controllers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers and applause after receiving a signal that the Grail-A probe was healthy and circling the moon. An engineer was seen on closed-circuit television blowing a noisemaker to herald the New Year’s Eve arrival.“This is great, a big relief,” deputy pr

Jan. 1, 2012