Around the world
DEPORTED: Hong Kong put 96 Vietnamese asylum-seekers on a plane Tuesday and flew them back to their Communist homeland. The deportation, which was closed to the media, was observed by two monitors. The government said the 52 men, 23 women, 13 boys and eight girls came via North Korea and most arrived in Hong Kong in 1989. They were moved last week from the High Island Detention Center in Hong Kong's New Territories, where a prison guard was held hostage for 11 hours by the boat people in protest over the British colony's deportation policy. Hong Kong has deported 2,167 Vietnamese asylum-seekers since November 1991.
CREMATION: The elaborate cremation ceremony for the king's mother drew 613,000 mourners, Thai radio reported Tuesday, adding that another 2.6 million mourners attended ceremonies at temples across Bangkok. Thailand's Interior Ministry provided the crowd count for Sunday's cremation of the princess mother, mourned by son King Bhumibol Adulyadej in solemn Buddhist-Brahmin pageantry on a scale seldom seen in modern Thailand. Princess Sang-wal Mahidol died July 18, 1994, at age 94. An extended mourning period followed prior to Sunday's cremation. The king collected his mother's cremated remains Monday in a gold and diamond urn.
Across the nation
BROKEN RAIL? A broken rail may have caused a freight train to jump its tracks, touching off a propane tanker fire that has kept 1,700 residents from their homes in Weyauwega, Wis., for more than a week, a railroad president said. "It appears we had a broken rail," Ed Burkhardt, president of Wisconsin Central Transportation Corp., told The Oshkosh Northwestern on Monday. "It probably started as a small fracture and grew bigger after more traffic rolled over it." Propane tankers were still burning Tuesday from the March 4 derailment of a Wisconsin Central freight train.
CLIMBER BURNED: A teenager practicing mountain climbing on a high-voltage tower in Thousand Oaks, Calif., was critically burned when he or his equipment touched an electrical conductor, sending 220,000 volts of electricity through his body, authorities said. Michael Halsell, 17, was in extremely critical condition Tuesday at Sherman Oaks Hospital with third-degree burns or worse over 80 percent of his body.
Other news . . .
ANTI-RIOT POLICE opened fire on protesters in northwestern Iran last week, killing 27 people and injuring 80, according to Iran's main opposition group. There was no independent confirmation of the report . . . FRENCH POLYNESIAN authorities announced Tuesday they will return five Greenpeace ships seized last fall in high-seas protests of France's nuclear testing program . . . TURKEY'S PARLIAMENT approved a center-right coalition Tuesday to govern Turkey, ending an 11-week struggle to keep an Islamic party from taking control.