Asia, Deaths | featured news

Two shallow 5.6 magnitude earthquakes hit mountainous southwestern China on Friday, killing at least 50 people and forcing tens of thousands of people from damaged buildings, state media said.

North Korea says a typhoon that hit the peninsula last week killed 48 people and left 21,000 homeless. The update from the official Korean Central News Agency said Monday that Typhoon Bolaven also left more than 50 people injured or missing, damaged 50,000 hectares (123,550 acres) of farmland and destroyed or inundated 6,700 houses.

A 7.6-magnitude quake struck off the eastern coast of the Philippines late Friday, killing at least one person in a house collapse and triggering tsunami warnings in the region that sent coastal residents fleeing to high ground.

An earthquake that struck rural Indonesia left at least four people dead, authorities said Sunday. At least seven others were injured, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. The 6.6-magnitude hit Saturday near the city of Palu on the island of Sulawesi, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The Chinese capital's heaviest rainstorm in six decades killed at least 37 people, flooded streets and stranded 80,000 people at the main airport, state media and the government said on Sunday.

Health officials in Cambodia are searching for the cause of a mystery disease that has killed more than 60 children over the past three months, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

At least 13 people are dead after a train crash in India early Tuesday morning, a spokesman for the ministry of railways said.

Indonesian special forces have found the cockpit voice recorder from a Russian passenger jet that smashed into the side of a volcano, killing 45 people.

Army divers and rescue workers pulled 103 bodies out of a river after a packed ferry boat capsized in heavy winds and rain in remote northeast India, an official said Tuesday. At least 100 people were still missing after the boat carrying about 350 passengers broke into two pieces late Monday, said Pritam Saikia, the district magistrate of Goalpara district.

Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi, whose speeches helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, has died aged 76, says a fellow activist.