At least 12 people were killed and 20 others injured in a collision between a train and a tourist coach in central Slovakia yesterday.
The train smashed into the coach at full speed at a level crossing near the ski resort of Polomka Bucnik, in one of the country's worst accidents in recent years.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said he would hold an extraordinary meeting with his cabinet later yesterday to proclaim a day of national mourning.
There were 36 people on the coach, all from the town of Banovce-nad-Bebravou in western Slovakia, bound for a ski holiday.
King of Pop' eyes London concerts
Pop megastar Michael Jackson is in talks with concert organisers for a comeback series of up to 30 live shows in London later this year, a source close to the negotiations told AFP yesterday.
The source, who requested anonymity, confirmed British media reports that the 50-year-old 'King of Pop' could be set to play his first major concerts since his 2005 acquittal on child molestation charges.
London's O2 arena is reportedly competing with resort hotels in Las Vegas in the US for the right to host the shows, which could net the fallen icon up to €167 million, reports said.
Saudis block children's marriages
Marriage officials in Saudi Arabia have refused to marry three 13-year-old girls, amid an outcry by rights activists over child marriages, Al-Watan newspaper reported yesterday.
Last week marriage officials told the parents of three girls that they were too young, citing a recent instruction by the head of the Dammam regional courts, Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Raqib, Watan reported.
When the father of one then sought permission from Raqib, he was told to wait until she was 15.
World singing record broken
A South Korean housewife yesterday broke a world record in marathon singing after crooning for more than 76 hours without stopping at a Seoul karaoke bar.
Kim Sun-Ok, 54, broke the 75-hour Guinness World Record held by Marcus Lapratt of the US, the private Korea Record Institute said.
She started singing at 2.14 a.m. on Thursday and sang a total of 1,283 tunes before she gave up at 3.21 p.m. yesterday following her family's appeal for her to quit for the sake of her health.
Under Guinness World Record regulations, she was given 30-second breaks between songs and five-minute breaks every hour.
Jailed Australian writer pardoned
An Australian writer jailed for in-sulting the Thai royal family flew home to a tearful reunion with his family yesterday after being par-doned by the king and freed from jail.
Feeling "bewildered, dazed and nauseous", Harry Nicolaides touched down in the city of Melbourne yesterday after spending five months in a Bangkok prison on charges of slandering the Thai monarchy.
Thai officials said 41-year-old Nicolaides was released Friday evening after officials approved a royal pardon - the result of intense lobbying by Canberra. "I was informed I had a royal pardon and asked to kneel before a portrait of the king - a royal audience of sorts," Nicolaides told reporters on arrival at Melbourne airport.
"A few hours before that I was climbing out of a sewerage tank that I fell into in the prison."
81% of conflicts in biodiversity hotspots
Most conflicts fought in the second half of the last century were waged in biologically diverse, fragile places, with many negative consequences and a few surprising positive ones, a study has said.
A team of international con-servation scientists found that 81 per cent of conflicts fought between 1950 and 2000 in which at least 1,000 people died played out in 'biodiversity hotspots' from the Himalayas in Asia to the coastal forests of east Africa.
The hotspots contain the entire populations of more than half of all plant species and at least 42 per cent of all vertebrates, and are highly threatened, said the study, which was published in Conservation Biology magazine.
Of the 34 such hotspots around the globe, only 11 escaped armed conflict during the 50-year period, the authors said.
Conflicts often play out in the hotspots because fighters take advantage of the cover provided by deep forests and high mountains.
And the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has increased conflict's impact on the world's fragile zones.