Six dead as heavy snow hits Balkans

FREEZING temperatures and heavy snowfall have killed at least six people and caused travel chaos across the Balkans.

Officials said four people have died in Croatia and two in Serbia as a result of blizzards in the region of southwestern Europe over the weekend, closing airports and roads and blocking public transportation in big cities.

People travelling in vehicles waited for hours on several roads in Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina, including the main highway leading from Belgrade to the Hungarian border, before rescue teams could free them from 50cm of snow that had fallen in just a few hours.

A woman gave birth to a healthy baby in a stranded truck on her way to a hospital, and named her Snezana, or Snow White in Serbian, state TV reported.

Ivica Dacic, who serves as Serbia's prime minister and interior minister, ordered all available police personnel to take part in the rescue operations.

The airport in Zagreb, Croatia, was closed for several hours on Saturday, and some of that nation's roads were closed because of high winds and heavy snow. The situation improved in Croatia on Sunday, but a warning against driving remained in place because of icy roads.

Authorities in Serbia and Croatia warned people to stay indoors.

Blizzards have also hit Slovenia and Bosnia.

As the storms headed east across the Balkans on Sunday, Romania's army was trying to clear snowbound roads as the country voted in a parliamentary election.

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13 die after Taiwan bus falls into ravine

A TOUR bus has plunged 300 metres down a ravine deep inside Taiwan's mountains in Hsinchu County, killing 13 passengers.

Ten others were injured in the crash which occurred on Sunday, according to the Hsinchu fire bureau.

Authorities said the passengers were mostly alumni of a local elementary school, in their sixties, who had booked the bus to visit an indigenous mountain village.

"Some died because they were thrown out of the bus," Lin Yuan-yuan, a fire bureau official, told DPA.

"Others were killed inside, as if they were thrown by the bus to the wrong spot at the wrong time."

Local media reported slick road conditions at the crash site.

Investigators are expected to question the driver, who survived the crash.

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Report into CTV building collapse due

THE results of the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission investigation into the collapse of the CTV building in Christchurch will be released on Monday afternoon.

The third and final part of the commission's report examines the collapse of the building, which claimed 115 lives in the February 22, 2011 earthquake.

It also deals with roles and responsibilities in the building sector, including building assessments after earthquakes, the training of civil engineers and the regulation of the engineering profession.

It looks at the building consent process and local government management of earthquake risk.

The first part of the report, which examined the PGC building collapse in which 18 people died, was released by the government in August. It contained 70 technical recommendations.

Part two was released last week. It examined 21 other building failures which caused 42 deaths, and made recommendations about minimising the risk from earthquake-prone buildings.

The commission's rulings are not binding on the government.

The final part of the report was given to Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae last month. The families were briefed on Sunday.

Deaths in the CTV building are also investigated by Coroner Gordon Matenga, who has reserved his ruling after an inquest which ended on Thursday.

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10 dead after army opens fire in S Sudan

AT least 10 people have been killed after South Sudanese troops opened fire on demonstrators angry at officials moving the seat of local authority outside a state capital.

"The SPLA (army) opened fire" on protesters "demonstrating the excessive use of force," said UN peacekeeping mission spokesman Liam McDowall.

Four people were killed in the town of Wau during clashes overnight Saturday, while six more were shot dead on Sunday, he said.

However, there were conflicting reports as to whether some of the demonstrators may also have been armed.

"We are investigating the allegations of armed elements inside the demonstrations, as well as allegations of the disproportionate use of force by the army against civilians," Kella Kueth, an army spokesman, told AFP.

Protests began after officials said they would move the seat of local authority out from Wau, capital of Western Bahr el Ghazal state, to a nearby smaller settlement of Bagare.

Troops were sent in on Saturday to remove protesters blockading roads leading out of Wau, while UN peacekeepers had been shuttling between demonstrators and the army to try to calm both sides.

"A number of protesters fled to the cathedral where they took sanctuary," McDowall said, adding that the army later surrounded the building and had to be persuaded back to their barracks by the Bishop of Wau.

The situation was "still tense" on Sunday, with authorities issuing a curfew from dusk until dawn, McDowall added.

South Sudan, the world's youngest nation, is awash with weapons after decades of war with Sudan, which it broke free from in July 2011.

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Syria-linked clashes kill six in Lebanon

SECTARIAN clashes linked to the 21-month conflict in Syria have killed six people and wounded 40 in neighbouring Lebanon.

Sunday's fighting in the northern city of Tripoli between Sunni Muslims and Alawite co-religionists of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad came amid growing international concern about the potential for neighbouring countries to be dragged into the conflict.

Sunni residents of the port city's Bab al-Tebbaneh district exchanged machine gun and rocket fire with Alawite residents of the neighbouring Jabal Mohsen district, leaving three members of each community dead, the security official said.

The fighting, which erupted before dawn, broke a tense calm that had held since the army deployed troops between the two impoverished neighbourhoods early on Friday.

During the night, troops held their positions on side streets but not on the ironically named Syria Street that forms the frontline.

The clashes rocked Tripoli's rival neighbourhoods intermittently throughout the day, the security official said, adding that fighting was still taking place "off and on" in the afternoon.

The latest deaths brought the toll from fighting in the city since Tuesday to 19, including two children.

Longstanding tensions in Tripoli escalated when 22 Sunnis from the Tripoli area who had crossed into Syria to join the armed rebellion against Assad's rule were ambushed by troops in the town of Tal Kalakh on November 30.

Damascus later agreed to repatriate the bodies at the request of the Lebanese foreign ministry, and on Sunday the corpses of three of the slain fighters were received at the Arida border crossing, a security source said.

The atmosphere was tense with shots fired into the air as the bodies of Khader al-Din, Abdel Hakim al-Salah and Mohammed al-Mir were handed over, an AFP correspondent reported.

The body of Mir was initially given to the wrong family but later returned to his father. The others were buried straight after funeral prayers.

A Lebanese official told AFP that Syrian authorities told their counterparts that some members of the group had survived the ambush and were being interrogated.

Opposition activists posted video footage on the internet on Saturday, with the caption: "Abuse of the corpses of the Tripoli martyrs in Tal Kalakh."

In the video, a man is seen kicking at least five lifeless bodies lain out on the ground, while others can be heard cracking jokes in the background. Its authenticity could not be verified.

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US drone kills senior al-Qaeda leader

A US drone strike has killed a senior al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan's tribal region near the Afghan border, Pakistani intelligence officials say.

Sheik Khalid bin Abdel Rehman al-Hussainan, who was also known as Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti, was killed when missiles slammed into a house on Thursday near Mir Ali, one of the main towns in the North Waziristan tribal area, the officials said.

Al-Kuwaiti appeared in many videos released by al-Qaeda's media wing, Al-Sahab, and was presented as a religious scholar for the group.

Earlier this year, he replaced Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaeda's second in command, who was killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan in June, the intelligence officials said. Al-Libi was a key religious figure within al-Qaeda and also a prominent militant commander.

Al-Kuwaiti appeared to be a less prominent figure and was not part of the US State Department's list of most wanted terrorist suspects, as al-Libi had been.

Covert CIA drone strikes have killed a series of senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan's tribal region over the past few years. But the attacks are controversial because the secret nature of the program makes it difficult to determine how many civilians are being killed.

Pakistani officials often criticise the strikes as a violation of the country's sovereignty, which has helped make them extremely unpopular in the country.

Al-Kuwaiti's wife and daughter were wounded in Thursday's drone attack, according to the intelligence officials. His wife died a day later at a hospital in Miran Shah, another main town in North Waziristan.

Al-Kuwaiti was buried in Tappi village near Mir Ali on Friday, the officials said.

A Pakistani Taliban commander who frequently visits North Waziristan told the Associated Press that he met some Arab fighters on Saturday who were "very aggrieved."

The Arabs told him they lost a "big leader" in a drone strike, but would not reveal his name or his exact position in al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda's central leadership in Pakistan has been dealt a series of sharp blows in the past few years, including the US commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad last year. A significant number of senior al-Qaeda leaders have also been killed in US drone attacks in the country.

Many analysts believe the biggest threat now comes from al-Qaeda franchises in places like Yemen and Somalia.

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New voting law jeopardises coalition seats

THE coalition could lose a swag of marginal seats at next year's federal election as new electoral laws automatically enrol up to 1.5 million voters.

An analysis of Newspoll surveys indicate the coalition's primary vote would slip by 1.5 percentage points if those eligible to vote but not enrolled - mainly young people - were enrolled, The Australian reports.

As many as a dozen Liberal and Nationals seats could come into play if Labor and the Australian Greens could mobilise the "youth vote", the paper said.

The coalition holds 10 seats with a margin of less than two per cent. The most vulnerable are the Liberal-held Boothby in South Australia (0.3 per cent); Hasluck in Western Australia (0.6 per cent); and Aston in Victoria (0.7 per cent).

Brisbane (1.1 per cent) and Solomon in Darwin (1.8 per cent) have a high proportion of students and young workers, while Herbert in far north Queensland (2.1 per cent) and Swan in Perth (2.5 per cent) have very high proportion of young people of voting age.

The Greens would be the main beneficiary of direct enrolment, in effect from July, analysis by Professor Ian McAllister of the Australian National University found. Their first preference vote would rise by 0.6 of a point, while Labor's vote would increase very marginally.

"These are small changes, but they would be magnified in inner city areas where young people are more concentrated," Prof McAllister, co-director of the Australian Election Study, told The Australian.

"They could easily affect the outcome in a tightly held seat. The result in around half a dozen seats could be determined by these enrolment changes."

The past four federal elections may have been decided by voters aged 18-34, about 30 per cent of the electorate, a Whitlam Institute study last year of Newspoll data over 14 years found. And there are 1.5 million "missing" voters - 9.5 per cent of eligible voters, The Australian Electoral Commission estimates.

Prof McAllister analysed four special Newspoll surveys covering 4857 adults. The coalition's primary vote slipped from 40.3 per cent to 38.8 per cent when adding in direct enrolments; Labor's vote edged up a single notch to 34.9 per cent; and the Greens rose from 10.9 per cent to 11.5 per cent.

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Syria rebels seize chunk of Aleppo base

SYRIAN rebels have seized control of a sector of Sheikh Suleiman base west of Aleppo, bringing them closer to holding a large swathe of territory extending to the Turkish border in the north.

The rebels on Sunday took control of Regiment 111 and three other company posts located inside the base after fierce fighting overnight, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"Two rebels and one soldier were killed, while five soldiers were captured. The prisoners said that 140 of their men had fled to the scientific research centre on the base," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Sheikh Suleiman sprawls over nearly 200 hectares of rocky hills about 25km from Aleppo city, an area now almost completely under rebel control.

Elsewhere in northern Syria, 10 were reported killed in regime shelling of the town of Maraayan, while five civilians, including a child, were killed as Ahsam village in Idlib province was shelled, the Observatory said.

The Observatory, which relies on a countrywide network of activists and medics, gave an initial toll of 41 people killed nationwide on Sunday, including 19 civilians.

Meanwhile nine state judges and prosecutors have defected to the opposition.

The Observatory says the latest defectors from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad come from the northern city of Adlib.

In video statement, posted online on Sunday, the nine judges identify themselves by name as one of them reads a joint statement and urges others to break ranks with Assad.

Many government officials and army officers have abandoned the regime to join the opposition since the uprising started in March 2011.

Ex-Prime Minister Riad Hijab is the most senior Syrian official to defect so far.

Syria's opposition is dominated by members of the country's Sunni minority. Assad's regime is predominantly Alawite, an offshoot group of Shi'ite Islam.

In all, more than 42,000 people have been killed since the uprising against al-Assad's rule erupted in March last year, according to the Observatory's figures.

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