Boy, six, rescued from the rubble of Java quake

Java: A six-year-old Indonesian boy has been rescued after being trapped for two days under the rubble of his house after an earthquake that killed at least 271 people.

Heavy monsoon rains have led to a suspension of rescue efforts on the main island of Java, with the death toll likely to rise.

Many people are still missing, some badly-hit remote areas remain unreachable and more than 2,000 people were injured after Monday’s 5.6 magnitude quake.

Hospitals near the epicentre on the densely populated island of Java were already overwhelmed, with patients hooked up to IV drips lying on stretchers and cots in tents set up outside, awaiting further treatment.

It was the deadliest earthquake in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed about 4,340 people.

Many of the dead in this week’s earthquake were school students who had finished their classes for the day and were taking extra lessons at Islamic schools when the buildings collapsed, West Java governor Ridwan Kamil said.

New York: Security staff at a United States airport got a big surprise when they spotted a cat inside a traveller’s bag.

Officials at John F Kennedy airport in New York had already noticed ginger fur sticking out of a suitcase when an X-ray confirmed their suspicions: there was a cat in the bag.

Lisa Farbstein, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration said: “On the bright side, the cat’s out of the bag.”

The passenger who owned the case was required to return to the ticket desk after the cat was found.

Ms Farbstein said: “The traveller said that the cat belonged to someone else in the household, implying that he was not aware that the cat was in the suitcase.”

She joked: “We call that a good catch.”

The stowaway cat, identified by the New York Post newspaper as being called Smells, was returned to its owner.

The cat’s owner told the paper that Smells must have crawled into the suitcase of a visiting friend.

She did not know that her tabby was missing until airport officials called her.

Kordofan: At least 26 people have died in Sudan from Dengue fever, in one of the worst outbreaks the country has seen in recent years, health officials said.

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne disease that occurs in tropical areas of the world, usually spreading near stagnant sources of water.

There were 460 confirmed cases of the disease and a further 3,436 suspected cases, the Sudanese health ministry announced on social media. The figures were dated as being recorded on Monday.

Around 20 of the deaths were recorded in the southern Kordofan region, one of the areas where the outbreak was first reported by the Sudanese Doctors’ Committee in early November.

Several local media outlets put the official number of cases as much higher.

Dengue fever has flu-like symptoms and can often lead to organ failure and death.

In 2019, an outbreak in Sudan was responsible for five deaths according to the World Health Organisation.