Iran coal mine collapse and blast kills 8

IRAN'S official news agency says a collapse and explosion in a coal mine has killed eight workers in the country's east.

IRNA on Wednesday quoted Ahmad Talebian Moqadam, who is governor of Tabas city near where the accident occurred, as saying that a tunnel in the mine collapsed, leading to an accumulation of gas and an explosion. He said five bodies were recovered on Tuesday, the day of the accident, and three more the next day.

Some 40 work at the mine. The report did not say whether the other miners were unaccounted for.

Tabas is located 560 kilometres southeast of the capital Tehran. Mine explosions are rare in Iran.

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Review slams BBC over Savile report

THE BBC has been cleared of covering up allegations of child sex abuse against its late presenter Jimmy Savile, but an official probe has found widespread chaos at the corporation.

The BBC's deputy director of news, Stephen Mitchell, resigned in the fall-out, the broadcaster revealed, a month after the crisis felled BBC Director-General George Entwistle after just 54 days in the job.

Savile, who died last year at the age of 84, was one of the BBC's top television and radio presenters and the allegations of child abuse against him have plunged the corporation into crisis.

Following a television program by rival ITV two months ago in which several women went public with the claims, police have identified 199 crimes in which Savile is a suspect, including 31 alleged rapes.

The BBC's flagship Newsnight program began investigating the allegations shortly after Savile's death, but after a few weeks dropped the report.

An official investigation by former Sky News executive Nick Pollard, published on Wednesday, found no substance to accusations that Newsnight dropped the story because it clashed with BBC Christmas tributes to Savile.

But the probe paints a picture of a corporation dogged by "chaos and confusion", in-fighting and a lack of leadership.

"The decision to drop the original investigation was flawed and the way it was taken was wrong but I believe it was done in good faith. It was not done to protect the Savile tribute programs or for any improper reason," Pollard said.

He added: "In my view, the most worrying aspect of the Jimmy Savile story for the BBC was not the decision to drop the story itself. It was the complete inability to deal with the events that followed."

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Time names Obama person of the year

TIME magazine has named the recently re-elected US President Barack Obama as its person of the year for 2012 - the second time it has accorded him this honour.

The venerable American news magazine said the United States is in the midst of huge cultural and demographic changes and Obama is "both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America."

The magazine noted that Obama was the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win more than 50 per cent of the vote in two straight elections and the first since 1940 to be re-elected despite a jobless rate above 7.5 per cent.

Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney soundly in November's election to win a second four year term.

"In 2012, he found and forged a new majority, turned weakness into opportunity and sought, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union," said Time, which named Obama person of the year in 2008 when he became America's first black president.

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Mother of Jihad bomb T-shirt boy in court

THE mother and uncle of a three-year old named Jihad, who was born on September 11, are due in a French court for sending him to school in a top with "I am a bomb" written on it.

The sweatshirt also had the words "Jihad, born on September 11" emblazoned on the back when he turned up at his nursery school in the southern town of Sorgues on September 25.

The pair are charged with condoning a crime over the alleged reference to the 9/11 attacks on New York's twin towers in 2001. The uncle bought the top and the mother dressed her son in it when she sent him to school that day.

Jihad's teacher alerted the authorities and a few days later the town mayor, Thierry Lagneau of the conservative UMP party, asked prosecutors to investigate.

"I condemn the attitude of the parents who shamefully took advantage of the person and the age of this child to convey a political message," Lagneau said.

The mother and uncle of the boy, who official records show was born on September 11, 2009 and was given Jihad as his first name, were not known Islamists, prosecutors said.

The mother was astonished at the reaction to her son's top and at the proportions the affair had taken on, they added.

She and her brother were due in court in Avignon, southern France, on Tuesday afternoon.

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Zuma wins ANC leadership vote by landslide

SOUTH African president Jacob Zuma has scored a thumping victory in an ANC leadership contest, opening the way for him to lead Africa's largest economy until 2019.

Zuma won the backing of 75.1 per cent of the ANC's 3977 voting delegates at a party conference in Bloemfontein, making him the odds-on favourite to retain the presidency after 2014 general elections.

Businessman Cyril Ramaphosa won the deputy presidency of the party with 76.4 per cent of the vote in a three-way race, setting him up to become Zuma's potential eventual successor and country president.

The vote took place despite the conference being threatened by right wing extremists.

Police said four men plotted to kill country president Zuma, Motlanthe, government ministers and senior party officials. The men were charged with treason and terrorism.

Inside the conference there were also plots and intrigue.

Zuma had faced an embarrassing, if lacklustre, leadership challenge from his Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, who won 991 of the votes.

Party secretary general Gwede Mantashe and chairwoman Baleka Mbete were re-elected to their positions, with newcomers deputy-secretary general Jesse Duarte and treasurer general Zweli Mkhize, who is also the premier of Zuma's home province KwaZulu-Natal.

The scale of Zuma's victory, dubbed a "Zumanami," will take some of the heat of the embattled president.

But after three crisis-marked years in power, Zuma faces a tough slog ahead.

He will have to work hard to win back South African voters, who increasingly see the ANC as out of touch, incompetent and corrupt.

Zuma's poll numbers have steadily eroded amid a series of scandals.

Criticism of his administration reached a crescendo earlier this year when police killed 34 striking miners in one day and it emerged that around $US27 million ($A25.71 million) of taxpayers' money had been used to refurbish his private home.

Zuma will also face an uphill struggle to correct the course of the ailing South African economy.

Unemployment remains stuck around 25 per cent and the economy is growing at its slowest rate in three years.

Meanwhile crucial sectors like mining have been hobbled by strikes over low wages and are struggling to modernise and reduce reliance on masses of cheap labour.

Credit ratings agencies have warned that further rating downgrades will come if the conference does not see the ANC change course.

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Man in hospital after shooting

A 21-YEAR-OLD man has been taken to hospital with gunshot wounds after an incident in Melbourne's northeast on Tuesday.

Emergency services were called to a home in Mooroolbark at 6.20pm (AEDT) to treat a man with gunshot wounds to his lower torso.

Police are investigating.

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Dollar unlikely to return to lows: Stevens

THE Australian dollar is unlikely to return to the lower levels experienced before 2007, Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens says.

In an interview published on Wednesday, Mr Stevens said that while he expected non-mining business investment to pick up, the bank could not guarantee that monetary policy would provide an easy transition from mining to non-mining investment.

"We've got to recognise that monetary policy has limits to fine tuning," he told The Australian Financial Review in his first newspaper interview since taking office in 2006.

"We're not going to be able to absolutely guarantee seamlessly every handover from one source of demand to another."

He also predicted that the Australian dollar was unlikely to return to the low numbers of around 75 US cents that were the norm before 2007 - adding there were limits to how the bank could harness interest rates to counteract the strong dollar's contractionary effects.

"... the classic problem in a situation like this can be that you seek to compensate for a very high exchange rate with cheaper, lower interest rates.

"It can - in some circumstances - give you the asset credit build-up that then gets you into trouble later," he said.

But he said you could not rule out that the exchange rate might drop if the boom ends.

"But if this relative price shift turns out to have a good deal of persistence, even if not at current levels, then I think one could expect the exchange rate is around a higher long-run average as a result of that.

"I don't know what that average is, but it would be unlikely that it would be in the low numbers that we have become accustomed to until the last five or six years," he said.

And while he expected house prices to retrace some of the losses experienced since mid-2010, he said it would be concerning if prices returned to double-digit annual growth rates.

Mr Stevens also said that while a three per cent official cash rate for Australia might be low by historical standards, globally it is "pretty attractive".

"I think we have to recognise that and accept that that has some impact on where we set things."

Ultra-low interest rates in the US, Japan and Europe compared to Australia are helping to keep the Australian dollar high and economic growth moderate.

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Man dies in shooting in Sydney's west

A MAN has died in a shooting in Sydney's southwest overnight.

Police said they were called to Owen Street in Punchbowl at around 11.15pm (AEDT) on Tuesday, following reports that a man had been shot.

Police and NSW Ambulance paramedics attended the scene and found a man, aged in his 20s, with gunshot wounds.

He died at the scene.

A crime scene has been established by police.

Owen Street Punchbowl is closed to traffic while investigators examine the scene, police said.

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Apple sells 2m iPhones in China in 3 days

APPLE says it sold more than two million iPhone 5s in China in their first three days of availability, setting a record for that market.

The iPhone 5, which launched in China on Friday, will be available in more than 100 countries by the end of December.

The phone first went on sale on September 21 in nine countries, including the US and Australia, with more than five million sold in the first three days.

That also set a record, but it only beat last year's iPhone 4S launch by a small margin, falling short of some analysts' expectations.

Apple shares hit an all-time high of $US705.07 that day, but in the months since the stock has plunged about 28 per cent.

On Sunday, Citi analyst Glen Yeung cut his rating for the company to "Neutral" from "Buy", questioning the strength of iPhone 5 demand and saying it's unlikely Apple shares will rally any time soon.

Apple Inc shares fell $US6.85 to $US502.94 in premarket trading on Monday.

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Hospital closes beds as budget cuts bite

UP to 700 patients could be locked out of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which will close beds next year due to federal government budget cuts.

Victorian hospital chiefs have been holding emergency meetings to work out what services could be cut in a co-ordinated fashion across the state, The Age says.

It says that while hospitals always scale back services over the Christmas-New Year holidays, they were now considering closing beds and operating theatres until mid-year.

Royal Melbourne executive director Diane Gill told the newspaper that she initially planned to close an operating theatre and 45 beds from the end of this week under regular holiday closures.

The beds were due to reopen on January 14 but will now stay closed until February 4.

The hospital is also considering closing a 25-bed ward from February 4 until the end of June.

The paper says the closures would effectively cut 700 operations.

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