ONE DEAD AS TRAIN CRASHES, DERAILS IN AUSTRALIA
SYDNEY: One man died and about a dozen others were injured on Saturday when a passenger train smashed into a truck and derailed in the southern Australian state of Victoria, authorities said.

The accident happened when the rear trailer of a truck attempting to drive across a level crossing in the Melbourne suburb of Dandenong South was struck by the passenger train, police investigators have been told. The bulk of the dozen or so injured passengers received mostly minor injuries. But police said that the man who died, thought to be in his 30s, was found in the rubble but could not be saved.

SUSPECTED MILITANT KILLED IN INDONESIAN POLICE RAID
POSO: Indonesian police on Saturday shot dead a suspected militant and seized bombs during a raid in a district that has been at the center of an anti-terror crackdown in the past week. The raid on a house was conducted by local police and the anti-terror unit at sunrise in Kayamaya village in Sulawesi Island’s central district of Poso. The raid came after an alleged militant was killed, two others arrested and explosives seized in a raid in Poso on Wednesday. There have been three failed bomb attacks in the district in the past week.

KOREAN ELEPHANT CAN IMITATE HUMAN SPEECH
YONGIN, South Korea: An elephant at a zoo in South Korea has learned to imitate human speech and has a vocabulary of several words, researchers said on Friday. Koshik, a 22-year-old male Asian elephant at Everland zoo in Yongin, a city south of Seoul, greeted visiting journalists by “saying” choah (good) and nuo (lie down). He can also make the sounds annyong (hi), anja (sit down) and aniya (no), according to a team of scientists from South Korea and Europe who studied his vocalizations. Elephants cannot use their lips to make sounds like humans do, as their upper lips are fused with their noses to form their trunks. But Koshik formulates the words by rolling up his trunk and putting it into his mouth. He then either places the tip of his trunk on his tongue or on the ceiling of his mouth to create different sounds. AFP