The mass murder took place on Sunday afternoon in a village in Chai Prakarn district of Chiang Mai province.
“Five boys were killed by a mentally ill man using a chopping knife,”
Police Lieutenant Colonel Sombut Kalasuk from Chai Prakarn police told
AFP.
“The wounds were to their necks and heads — they were aged from five months to eight years old,” he added.
ADVERTISEMENT
Pictures
widely shared on social media showed a scene of carnage, with the
blood-soaked corpses of the children littering the house.
At least one of the children was related to the pregnant woman, who
was taken to hospital suffering from stab wounds but survived the
ordeal.
Three of the bodies were found inside the house while another was
found dead next to a nearby fence. The fifth child died in hospital,
police added.
Sombat did not say what caused the unidentified man to turn violent.
But he said he had previously been treated in hospital for an
undisclosed mental health problem. He has since been arrested and taken
to hospital.
A doctor at Suanprung Hospital in Chiang Mai confirmed that the man had recently been released after receiving treatment.
“He had been treated here for two weeks before he went home because
he felt better,” said Paritat Silpakit, the hospital director.
Thailand provides universal healthcare but access can be patchy —
particularly in rural and remote areas — while the quality of mental
health services still leaves much to be desired.
“Inconsistency of medication and the distance from patients’ houses
to hospitals is still a challenge”, Panpimol Wipulakorn, deputy general
director of the Department of Mental Health, Ministry of Public Health,
told AFP.
US President Barack Obama has issued a
White House invitation to a Muslim schoolboy who was arrested for
bringing a homemade clock to school.
Ninth-grade high school student Ahmed
Mohamed from Irving, Texas, was arrested on Monday after his teachers
reported him to the police for making a clock, which they said resembled
a bomb.
The arrest prompted outrage on social
media with thousands expressing their anger at authorities for arresting
a 14-year-old boy over his school project.
ADVERTISEMENT
Social
media users rallied behind the teen using the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed,
which has picked up more than 500,000 mentions on Twitter so far,
according to analytics site Topsy, and continues to rise rapidly.
The story also ranked highest on the user-generated curation website, Reddit.
Police have said they will not charge
Mohamed but he told reporters on Wednesday that he remains suspended
from school until Thursday.
At least 20
people have been killed in two car bomb attacks in the northeastern
Syrian city of Hasakah, state television reported.
The
broadcaster said they were killed in a blast in the Mahata neighbourhood
of the city that followed a first blast in Khashman district.
State news agency SANA gave different tolls for the blasts, which it said were suicide car bombs.
ADVERTISEMENT
The agency said five people were killed in Khashman and 12 in Mahata, and also reported that least 70 others had been wounded.
A woman and her two children were among the dead, the Associated Press news agency reported.
The UK-based
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said the two explosions were
suicide car bombs, although it could not immediately confirm a toll.
Observatory
chief Rami Abdel Rahman said the first blast hit a checkpoint belonging
to the Kurdish security forces in Khashman, while the second struck the
headquarters of a pro-regime militia in Mahata.
Control of
Hasakeh city, and other parts of the province by the same name, is
divided between Kurdish groups and forces loyal to President Bashar
al-Assad.
The city has
regularly been targeted by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) group, which controls some territory in Hasakah province.
The group
entered the city and seized several neighbourhoods in June, but was
expelled a month later after battles involving both government troops
and Kurdish fighters.
Pakistan has promised to assist Nigeria in the areas of agriculture, economy and power sector development.
The Pakistani High Commissioner to
Nigeria, Lt. Gen. Agha Farooq (retd.), who said this when he paid a
courtesy visit on the Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu, explained that his
country could assist Nigeria on irrigation development and power
generation for fertilizer plants and small scale industries. A statement from the Information
office of the Pakistani High Commission on Friday in Abuja said the High
Commissioner was accompanied by his personal assistant, Furqaan Hassan,
and the Regional Head of Peel Aston Global Resources Limited for
Africa, Khomeini Bukhari, during the visit.
ADVERTISEMENT
It stated that the envoy expressed his country’s commitment to the
prosperity and progress of Nigeria, adding that Pakistan had been
cooperating with the country in the areas of education, agriculture and
the economy for a long time. The statement quoted Farooq as saying
that Pakistan, with its huge human resources in agriculture, technology
and industrial development, could help to deepen the growth of critical
sectors in Nigeria. The envoy said, “Pakistan has already
built bridges and is looking to build new bridges as we very much honour
and believe in the priority attention being given by President
Muhammadu Buhari to agriculture, education and the economy and Pakistan
is there to help the growth in this progression and to also contribute
tangibly.” Farooq also lauded Akiolu for his commitment to the peace and prosperity of Lagos and Nigeria as a whole.
The
Philippines has suspended exports of the macaque monkey after an Ebola
virus strain that is non-fatal to humans struck 20 of the animals,
killing 11, officials have said.
Eleven
captive Philippine macaques have died after contracting the bat-borne
Ebola Reston virus, while nine others are under treatment, Simeon
Amurao, assistant director of the Bureau of Animal Industry, said on
Thursday.
“All exports are suspended while we investigate this incident,” Amurao told the AFP news agency.
The
Philippines is among the world’s major exporters of laboratory monkeys
and has so far shipped close to 300 monkeys to Japan this year, and 600
last year, Amurao added.
“This kind
of Ebola is the least harmful in terms of human affectation.This is
limited to monkeys,” Health Secretary Janette Garin told reporters on
Thursday.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The situation has been contained. The possible sources [of infection] have been traced.”
Garin said
62 workers in two monkey-breeding facilities all tested negative for
infection in August following the deaths of 10 macaques that had
exhibited Ebola symptoms.
The 10
fatalities were traced to two other undisclosed breeding centres where
another 10 tested positive for the virus, one of which died, she said.
It was the first case of Ebola Reston among Philippine macaques since 1997, according to the agriculture department.
In 2009, 6,000 pigs at a farm in Manila’s northern suburbs were slaughtered after they tested positive for Ebola Reston.
Thousands of weary refugees have
continued to share desperate stories of survival as they make their way
across Europe’s borders, as European Union leaders ramp up the debate
about how many people each member state should accept.
On Hungary’s border with Serbia, fear and
fatigue have overcome many of the refugees, as Budapest prepared on
Thursday to deploy its military to bolster its border and stop people
from crossing.
The landlocked central European state is
also building a fence to keep the refugees out, but it did not stop
hundreds of refugees from scaling the fences and making their way into
the country on Wednesday.
Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom, reporting
from the border town of Roszke in Hungary, said some refugees are
claiming that they have been abused by authorities.
ADVERTISEMENT
“For
many, the borders hardly matter any more, because it’s their pain that
can’t be escaped,” our correspondent said, as he followed several
refugees, who were making their way to the border by foot.
For Sabah, a Syrian refugee trying to get
to Austria, every day is like torture as she makes her way into
Hungary. She told Al Jazeera how she and her husband were beaten by
police in Greece.
“When my husband and I got to Greece, a
policeman there beat us. He hit my husband and me with a metal stick. I
was three months pregnant. I lost my baby.”
Human Rights Watch said Hungary has become a place of humiliation for Syrian refugees.
At least ten people died and eight are missing after a South Korean
fishing charter boat capsized, the coastguard said Sunday, while three
survived after clinging to the wreckage for 10 hours.
The 9.77-tonne Dolphin went missing off the southwest coast near the
island of Chuja Saturday night and its wreckage was found Sunday
morning.
The three survivors have been rescued and flown by helicopter to a hospital on Jeju island south of Chuja.
“It has been determined that 21 people were on board the ill-fated
boat, with three having been rescued, 10 found dead and eight missing,”
Lee Pyung-hyun, chief of the Jeju coast guard, was quoted by Yonhap news
agency as saying.
ADVERTISEMENT
More
than 50 naval and coastguard vessels, as well as a Lynx helicopter and a
P-3C maritime patrol plane, were searching for the missing.
One survivor said the boat capsized “in an instant” before many passengers were swept away by strong waves.
“I was sleeping when the boat’s engine went off and the captain told
us to get out and water started to fill the boat,” the 38-year-old
surnamed Park told Yonhap.
Park said he and other survivors climbed on top of a floating piece
of the boat and held on for more than 10 hours before being rescued.
They praised the courage of the boat captain Kim Cheol-Soo, who was among the dead.
“Hold my hand!” a survivor called Lee quoted Kim as saying as the captain extended an arm from the top of the capsized boat.
“Our boat is connected to the coast guard, so they will come rescue
us. Don’t worry. They’ll be here soon,” the 46-year-old captain told
passengers, trying to lift their spirits as they clung desperately to
the boat.
Lee and the other two were saved early Sunday after hanging on to the
boat for more than 10 hours, crying out for help and encouraging each
other to hold on for just a little longer, Yonhap reported.
In contrast to the fishing boat skipper, the captain involved in
South Korea’s Sewol ferry disaster last year was among the first to
abandon ship.
More than 300 people — mainly schoolgirls — died when the ferry went down in April 2014.
A medical evacuation plane disappeared west of Senegal during a
flight from Burkina Faso to Dakar, Senegalese civil aviation authority
said in a statement on Sunday.
The aircraft carrying seven people, including a French patient went
down off the coast of Senegal at 7:08 p.m. (1908 GMT) on Saturday, said
the statement.
Senegal’s air force was conducting a search of the wreckage of the plane.
According to officials, the plan was carrying a Senegalese doctor,
two nurses,three crew members, two Algerians and one Congolese, apart
from the patient.
The plane, which had been scheduled to arrive in Dakar at 18:20, belonged to the private Senegalair company.
A technical investigation will be launched for further details, said the Senegalese civil aviation authority.
You need to install Flash Player to play this content.
'Olympic' sand sculptures on display at San Diego competition
8 minutes ago
Sand sculptors from around the world are competing in San Diego, California at the annual US Sand Sculpting Challenge.
The four-day festival, which began on Friday, has as the theme the run-up for US athletes to the Rio Olympics in 2016.
One of the sculptures features the transgender former Olympian, Caitlyn Jenner, who won gold in the decathlon as Bruce Jenner.
You need to install Flash Player to play this content.
Media captionBethany Bell reports from Austria's border with Hungary on the migrants' arrival: ''They are exhausted''
Thousands of migrants have crossed into Austria, after Hungary's surprise move to take them by bus to the border.
For
days the government had blocked them from travelling by train, but it
relented after many began walking towards the border on Friday.
About
4,000 people arrived in Austria, with many moving on to Germany.
Meanwhile a second group has set off on foot from Budapest towards the
border.
Austria says the migrants can apply for asylum there or carry on to Germany.
The
move comes as European Union countries are struggling to agree on how
to deal with a surge of asylum seekers - many of whom have fled conflict
in Syria. Follow our live updates
Hungary's government eased restrictions on transit after many frustrated migrants overwhelmed police cordons.
You need to install Flash Player to play this content.
Media captionMatthew Price has been travelling with some of the families and sharing video on social media
Overnight, buses picked up migrants from Keleti station in Budapest where thousands had been camped.
Vehicles were also sent to take those who had decided to walk along a motorway to Austria.
On
Saturday Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told the BBC
there would be no more buses or trains to take the migrants on to
Austria.
He said the transport had been arranged as a one-off, because of fears for the migrants' safety.
But
the BBC's Ben Brown reports from Budapest that the government's move
seems to have encouraged migrants who later streamed into the station.
The second group of about 1,000 migrants is now on its way to the border.
Image copyrightReutersImage caption
In Hungary, buses picked up hundreds waiting on the main road to Austria
Image copyrightEPAImage caption
After crossing the Austrian border, migrants were taken to Vienna
As thousands crossed the border on foot, some Austrians displayed welcome signs.
Austrian Red Cross workers at a makeshift centre greeted the migrants with blankets and tea.
"I feel [at] home," said Ayaz Morad, one of the first to arrive. "This is a great land - nice people, nice government."
The
migrants were being taken to Vienna by bus and rail. Special trains to
the capital are leaving the Austrian border town of Nickelsdorf every
half hour.
Many immediately boarded trains for Germany. Several hundred arrived at Munich station later on Saturday.
The
German government has said anyone coming from Syria can apply for
asylum. It expects about 6,000 people to arrive over the weekend.
'Exhausted, but smiling': Bethany Bell, BBC News, Austrian-Hungarian border
Image copyrightReutersThey crossed into Austria on foot - the Hungarian
buses stopped before reaching the border and they had to walk the final
stretch.
There were children and at least one man in a wheelchair.
They were exhausted. Some of them were limping, but many were smiling broadly - relieved to have finally left Hungary.
"Where are we?" one man shouted. "Austria," I replied. "Good," he said.
Germany has said it expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year.
Austria's
Chancellor Werner Faymann said that after talks with his German
counterpart Angela Merkel, they would allow in the migrants.
But
he said he expected Hungary to respect any EU quotas for asylum seekers -
something Hungary, along with the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia,
has rejected. Image copyrightEPAImage caption
Some railway passengers have been greeting the migrants as they transit through Austria
You need to install Flash Player to play this content.
Media captionJenny Hill reports from Munich railway station where volunteers are waiting with supplies
Hungary has become a major transit nation for people fleeing the Middle East and Africa.
The
Hungarian parliament on Friday approved tougher border controls and
penalties for migrants, underlining divisions within the EU on how to
tackle the crisis.
Also on Saturday, EU foreign ministers discussed the crisis at an informal meeting in Luxembourg.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said they had agreed to strengthen co-operation in five areas:
Protection of asylum seekers
Border controls
Fighting trafficking networks, particularly at sea
Helping transit countries outside the EU deal with the influx
Addressing the root causes of the crisis, notably instability in Libya and the Syria conflict.
At the scene: Matthew Price, BBC News
Our correspondent has been walking with hundreds of migrants who attempted to travel on foot to Austria.
Around 4.5 million Ethiopians could be in need of food aid because of a drought in the country, the UN has said.
Hardest-hit areas are Ethiopia’s eastern Afar and southern Somali
regions, while pastures and water resources are also unusually low in
central and eastern Oromo region, and northern Tigray and Amhara
districts.
Reacting to the UN’s claims that the number in need had increased by
more than 55 percent this year, Alemayew Berhanu, spokesman for Ministry
of Agriculture, told Al Jazeera that Ethiopia had “enough surplus food
at emergency depots and we’re distributing it”.
“When we were informed about the problem, the federal government and
the regional state authorities started an outreach programme for the
affected people,” he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
We are having to sell our cattle to buy food but the cattle are sick because they don’t have enough to eat.
In August, the Ethiopian government said that it had allocated $35m
to deal with the crisis that has been blamed on El Niño, a warm ocean
current that develops between Indonesia and Peru. The UN says it needs
$230m by the end of the year to attend to the crisis.
“The absence of rains means that the crops don’t grow, the grass
doesn’t grow and people can’t feed their animals,” David Del Conte,
UNOCHA’S chief in Ethiopia, said.
One farmer in the town of Zway told Al Jazeera that he was selling personal belongings to stay alive.
“There is nothing we can do. We don’t have enough crops to provide
for our families. We are having to sell our cattle to buy food but the
cattle are sick because they don’t have enough to eat,” Balcha, who has a
family of nine, and grows corn and wheat, said.
The onset of El Niño means the spatial distribution of rainfall from
June to September has being very low. According to the UN children’s
agency (UNICEF), the El Niño weather pattern in 2015 is being seen as
the strongest of the last 20 years.
Experts say it could be a major problem for the country’s economy, as agriculture generates about half of the country’s income.
Climate shocks are common in Ethiopia and often lead to poor or
failed harvests which result in high levels of acute food insecurity.
Approximately 44 percent of children under 5 years of age in Ethiopia
are severely chronically malnourished, or stunted, and nearly 28
percent are underweight, according to the CIA World Factbook.
UNICEF says that about 264,515 children will require treatment for
acute severe malnutrition in 2015 while 111,076 children were treated
for severe acute malnutrition between January and May 2015.
Former American President Jimmy Carter
announced Thursday that his cancer is on four small spots on his brain
and he will immediately begin radiation treatment.
On learning that the cancer had spread
beyond his liver, Carter said, “I just thought I had a few weeks left,
but I was surprisingly at ease. I’ve had a wonderful life.”
So far, the pain has been “very slight,”
Carter said, and he hasn’t experienced any weakness or debility. Still,
he will cut back on his work with the Carter Center and will give the
treatment regimen his “top priority.” His first radiation treatment was
set for Thursday afternoon.
Carter, appearing in a dark blazer, red
tie and jeans and surrounded by friends and family, said at first he
thought that the cancer was confined to his liver and that an operation
earlier this month completely removed it.
ADVERTISEMENT
But that afternoon an MRI showed it was on his brain.
Carter didn’t give any prognosis but
spoke about receiving treatments for at least several months and left
open the possibility of traveling to Nepal in November.
The Carter Center announced that he had a
small mass removed from his liver Aug. 3. He announced Aug. 12 that
surgery found cancer that has spread to other parts of his body. Doctors
removed about a tenth of his liver during the surgery, he said. He said
it’s still not clear exactly where the cancer originated.
“So far, the only place they’ve known about cancer has been my liver and my brain,” he said.
His father, brother and two sisters died
of pancreatic cancer. His mother died of breast cancer that spread to
other organs. Carter said no cancer has been found on his pancreas.
Chinese authorities say police have arrested 15,000 people on
suspicion of cybercrime, including hacking, online fraud and illegal
sale of personal information.
The Ministry of Public Security said on Tuesday that police have
investigated more than 7,400 cases of alleged online crimes, leading to
the arrests. It did not say when the arrests were made.
Authorities launched a six-month special operation to “clean the internet” in July, amid a growing crackdown on public dissent.
The ministry said the special operation has snared suspects who
hacked into websites of companies, banks and government agencies.
Some obtained personal information illegally, some altered web
information or uploaded content related to online gambling, and some
used the internet to defraud others, it said.
ADVERTISEMENT
China also prosecutes improper online speech, although the ministry’s announcement did not list cases involving that.
Police in
Bangladesh say they have arrested three men, including a British
citizen, in connection with the killing of two bloggers earlier this
year.
Rapid Action
Battalion spokesmen said on Tuesday that they have arrested Touhidur
Rahman, 58, and two other “active members” of Ansarullah Bangla Team,
which was banned in May over a spate of killings of bloggers.
“We’ve
arrested them in the capital [Dhaka] today. We can confirm that Rahman
is a Bangladesh origin British citizen. He is the main planner of the
attacks on Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das,” Major Maksudul Alam told
AFP news agency.
At least 14
other members belonging to several groups have been arrested this year
in connection with the violent deaths of bloggers in the South Asian
country.
Four
bloggers have been killed since January. On May 12, Ananta Bijoy Das was
killed in the Subid Bazar area of northern Sylhet district while
American writer-blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death near the Dhaka
University campus in February.
In March,
blogger Washiqur Rahman Babu was brutally killed in Dhaka by three men
over alleged anti-Islamic writings, with two of the suspected attackers
caught near the scene.
ADVERTISEMENT
The latest killing took place on August 7, when blogger Niloy Chatterjee, who used the pen-name Niloy Neel, was murdered.
Islamic environmental and religious
leaders have called on rich countries and oil producing nations to end
fossil fuel use by 2050.
The Islamic Climate Declaration says that the world's 1.6bn Muslims have a religious duty to fight climate change.
It urges politicians to agree a new treaty to limit global warming to 2C, "or preferably 1.5 degrees."
The Declaration asks Muslims, in the words of the Koran, "not to strut arrogantly on the Earth".
Drafted at an international symposium in Istanbul, the Declaration calls for "all people, leaders and businesses ...to commit to 100% renewable energy".
It also argues for increased financial support for communities vulnerable to climate change.
The
main focus though is on "well-off nations and oil-producing states,"
who are urged to lead the way in phasing out greenhouse gases, no later
than the middle of this century.
The Declaration calls on the
rich countries, to recognise their "moral obligation to reduce
consumption so that the poor may benefit from what is left of the
Earth's non-renewable resources".
"People
need to be told and politicians need to stop misleading their people,
in telling them they can go on increasing their standards of living for
ever and ever and ever," Fazlun Khalid, a long time Islamic
environmentalist involved in drawing up the Declaration, told BBC News.
"Someone
should be articulating this because it's an impossibility, they can't
do it - And this applies not just to Muslim countries."
The call
has been supported by religious leaders including the Grand Muftis of
Uganda and Lebanon, the president of Indonesia's major body of religious
scholars as well as environmental groups and government officials from
Morocco and Turkey.
The authors of the Declaration hope that it will be distributed in mosques all over the world
But critics have argued that
the Declaration is not truly representative of Islam with some of the
biggest Islamic nations not taking an active part in supporting the
call.
"Are all Islamic countries represented? I'd say no to that -
that's the honest answer," said Fazlun Khalid. "There is a huge amount
of lethargy - we are not set up like other churches, there is no Islamic
pope!
"The Declaration is like a trigger - to say, wake up wherever you are, wake up and take care of the Earth."
The Declaration comes in the wake of Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment and climate change, which was seen as a significant call for Catholics to engage on the issue of global warming.
Catholic leaders have praised the Islamic Declaration as a positive step.
"It
is with great joy and in a spirit of solidarity that I express to you
the promise of the Catholic Church to pray for the success of your
initiative and her desire to work with you in the future to care for our
common home and thus to glorify the God who created us," said Cardinal
Peter Turkson, who helped the Pope draft his encyclical.
The authors of the Declaration say that it will be available in mosques and madrassas around the world.
They
hope that it will influence political leaders in Muslim countries to
become more fully involved in global attempts to deliver a new treaty on
climate change, expected to be signed in Paris in December.
While around 50 countries have so far posted their plans for curbing climate change ahead of the meeting in Paris, very few Muslim countries have been among them.
I asked Fazlun Khalid if religious divisions between Muslims were a bigger issue at present than climate change.
"In
spite of their differences we want Muslims to wake up and think and
realise that this is a problem that affects every inch of this planet,
in spite of their differences, under their feet something is happening, a
deep plate shift in the Earth's crust," he said.
"In spite of our differences we have to take this on, as the major issue affecting the whole of the human world."
A grandson of the late Nelson Mandela appeared briefly in the Johannesburg Magistrates’ Court on Monday on a charge of rape.
“He made a brief appearance on a charge of the rape of a 15-year-old girl,” Gauteng police spokesperson Brigadier Mashadi Selepe said.
He has not yet pleaded to the charge of raping the girl at a pub in Greenside, Johannesburg, Selepe said.
Until he has pleaded, his name must be withheld.
Selepe said that because he was charged with a Section 6 offence, his bail application was expected to start on Friday, August 21. Until then, he would remain in custody. ADVERTISEMENT
In terms of these higher schedule offences, the Criminal Procedure Act places the onus on the bail applicant to show exceptional circumstances for release ahead of a trial.
According to the Daily Sun, the girl was raped in a toilet at the establishment last Friday.
Asked to comment on media reports that Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela had sent a bodyguard posing as a policeman to the girl, Selepe said the police had not received a complaint in this regard.
The Daily Sun quoted a family spokesperson as saying the girl’s father had tried to open a case with no success.
According to the spokesperson, Madikizela-Mandela asked the girl’s family to give her family time to deal with the issue.
“Instead, Winnie’s bodyguard went to the family pretending to be a cop. The father was told there was no need to arrest the suspect, but when the father asked to see his badge, he didn’t have one. It turned out he had been sent by Winnie,” he reportedly said.
The Sunday Sun reported that after a meeting at her home in Soweto, Madikizela-Mandela promised to hand her grandson over to the police.
Hadi Juraid, Transport Ministry Spokesman, said search and rescue
teams on Tuesday found all 54 bodies in the wreckage of a plane that
crashed at the weekend in Indonesia’s Papua province.
He said in Jakarta that the ATR 42-300 aircraft operated by Trigana
Air Service crashed on Sunday, just 10 minutes before its scheduled
arrival at Oksibil in the mountainous Pegunungan Bintang district.
Juraid said if the weather was favourable, the bodies would be
immediately evacuated and handed over to the affected families once they
were identified.
Julius Barata, another Transport Ministry official, said the
aircraft’s flight data and voice recorders, known as black boxes, were
also found.
ADVERTISEMENT
He said the recorders would be handed over to the National Transport Safety Committee for investigation.
Search Chief Bambang Sulistyo said the plane was totally destroyed and many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.
He said earlier attempts by rescue workers to reach the location had been hampered by mountainous terrain and bad weather.
FX Haryono, the Head of the Jayapura post office, said the plane was
on a 55-minute flight from the provincial capital Jayapura to Oksibil.
He said four of the passengers were post office workers carrying 468,000 dollars in cash.
Haryono said the money was to be distributed to families in Pegunungan Bintang under a government social welfare scheme.
Critics said Papua relies heavily on air transport because of limited road networks through its jungle.
They said the crash was the third major air accident in Indonesia in eight months.
They recalled that on Dec. 28, AirAsia flight QZ8501 crashed into the
Java Sea off Borneo midway from Surabaya to Singapore, killing all 162
people on board.
Also in June at least 141 people were killed after an Indonesian Air
Force C-130 plane crashed into a residential area in Medan, North
Sumatra and burst into flames.
They said the frequent crashes were likely to raise more questions about the country’s aviation safety.
At least nine people have died in
heavy exchanges of artillery fire between Ukrainian government forces
and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Russia said the latest fighting suggested preparations for a new offensive by the Ukrainians.
But Kiev accused the rebels of shelling the outskirts of Mariupol - a key port city - from 12km (7.4 miles) away.
Meanwhile, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has visited Crimea, which Moscow annexed last year.
He
said it would be "dangerous" for ethnic groups to seek special status,
seen as a reference to the Tatars who make up about 10% of Crimea's
population and largely opposed the takeover.
Mr Putin also alleged
that Ukraine's government was "under external control, with key
positions in the government and regions filled by foreign citizens".
Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko called the visit "a challenge to the civilised world". The latest escalation in eastern Ukraine has left the ceasefire signed in February looking more fragile than ever.
Among the dead were seven civilians and two government soldiers, reports said.
Kiev,
Western governments and Nato say there is clear evidence of Russian
regular troops helping the separatists and arming them with heavy
weapons - something Moscow denies.
Sartana and Lebedynske - villages on the eastern outskirts of Mariupol - came under heavy rebel fire, the Kiev authorities said.
They said two Ukrainian troops and two civilians were killed by the rebel shelling.
Russian 'alarm'
Meanwhile,
the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Kiev of refusing to
demilitarise Shyrokyne, a village east of Mariupol that has seen some of
the heaviest fighting.
"We're alarmed by the developments in
recent days, which very strongly remind us of preparations for another
round of combat operations," he said.
This house, in Sartana near Mariupol, was damaged by rebel shelling
Rebel armoured units have Russian military help, the West says
The news service of the
self-styled rebel "Donetsk People's Republic" said government artillery
had shelled the outskirts of Donetsk, killing two civilians, and the
city of Horlivka, where three civilians died. Rebel-held Horlivka is
just north of Donetsk.
Under the ceasefire, signed in the
Belarusian capital Minsk, both sides were supposed to pull back their
heavy weapons. But they accuse each other of reneging on the agreement.
At the end of last month a senior UN official, Cecile Pouilly, said
nearly 7,000 people had been killed in eastern Ukraine since fighting
erupted there in mid-April 2014. She said more than 17,000 had been
injured in the conflict.
An American man famed for dressing
up as Batman and visiting sick children in hospital has died after he
was hit by a car in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Police said Leonard Robinson's car had broken down in the fast lane of a major highway when the incident occurred.
He was struck by his own "Batmobile" after another car careered into it.
Robinson, 51, rose to fame in 2012, when a video went viral of him being pulled over by police because his car had invalid number plates.
Known
as the "Route 29 Batman", Robinson had spent the last 14 years visiting
sick children in hospital and handing out Batman paraphernalia in full
superhero dress.
You need to install Flash Player to play this content.
Media captionPolice could be heard on the video saying "you can send me Robin if you wish"
According to the Washington Post,
he sold his commercial cleaning business to help fund his "Batmobile" -
a black Lamborghini. The paper said he spent more than $25,000
(£16,000) of his own money on Batman toys, T-shirts and books to give to
children.
"I'm just doing it for the kids," Robinson told the paper in a profile of him from 2012.
He
also drove a replica of the car from the 1960s Batman TV show, which he
went on to use to visit children in hospitals across the country.
His son would occasionally join him on hospital visits dressed as Batman's sidekick, Robin.
Robinson
was never charged in the 2012 incident that thrust him into the public
spotlight, telling police he was on his way to cheer up children at a
cancer ward in a nearby hospital.
A number of people have paid tribute to him on Twitter, including the Bowie Baysox - a minor league Baseball team in Maryland - which said: "The Baysox offer heartfelt condolences to Lenny Robinson's family. He appeared as Batman at the Baysox several times."
According
to the Washington Post, he was returning from a car show in Virginia
when the incident occurred. Police say the crash is under investigation,
but no charges have been filed.
The UN's humanitarian chief has said he is "horrified" by the attacks on civilians taking place in Syria.
Stephen O'Brien told reporters
during a visit to Damascus that the targeting of non-combatants in the
country's war was "unlawful, unacceptable and must stop".
He was "particularly appalled" by government air strikes on a rebel-held suburb of the capital on Sunday.
Activists said on Monday that the death toll from the attack on a market in Douma had risen to at least 96.
That
would make it one of the bloodiest single incidents of the
four-year-long conflict, which has so far left more than 250,000 people
dead.
A Syrian military source told the Reuters news agency that
the air force had targeted the headquarters of the rebel group, Jaysh
al-Islam (Army of Islam).
A Syrian military source said the air force had targeted the headquarters of a rebel group
State television also reported
that rebels had shelled a government-held district of the northern city
of Aleppo on Monday, killing 10 people and wounding 17.
'Total disregard for civilian life'
Mr
O'Brien called on both sides to protect civilians and respect
international humanitarian law at the end of a three-day visit to Syria,
his first to the country since becoming the UN's under-secretary
general for humanitarian affairs in May.
"I
am absolutely horrified by the total disregard for civilian life by all
parties in this conflict," he said. "Attacks on civilians are unlawful,
unacceptable and must stop." The Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights, a UK-based group that monitors the conflict, said that in
Sunday's raid on Douma air force jets fired at least 10 rockets at the
town's central market before attacking again after rescue workers
arrived.
One video said to be of the aftermath showed a
marketplace completely destroyed with surrounding buildings in ruins and
vehicles on fire. A report by Amnesty International
published last week accused the government of committing war crimes
against the 163,000 people living under siege in Douma and other towns
in the Eastern Ghouta agricultural belt around Damascus.
Between
January and June 2015, government forces carried out at least 60 aerial
attacks on the area, killing some 500 civilians, the report said. Mr O'Brien also condemned rival
armed groups for cutting off the water supply in Damascus and Aleppo in
recent days, affecting at least seven million people.
"It is unacceptable for those engaged in conflict to use access to water and other services as a weapon of war," he said.
The
British diplomat noted that the UN and its partners were providing
assistance to millions of Syrians in need, but he added: "I remain
extremely concerned for the welfare of the 4.6 million people stuck in
hard-to-reach and besieged areas."
He also expressed concern at
the lack of funding for the humanitarian operation in Syria and its
neighbours, which is less than 30% funded.
