The boy and his family were in NYC on Chinese New Year’s Eve when the father, who identified himself as ‘Eagle Daddy’, stripped his son, Duo Duo, down to his underwear and forced him to run around a street in China Town.

Shivering in the cold, the poor child pleaded with his father, who was filming the incident, to give him a hug.

“Eagle Daddy”, who has since returned to his home in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, justified his behavior by saying that his son’s regiment is only going to make him stronger and defy the odds of survival that was given to him at birth.

The 44-year-old father said he was told by doctors that his son, who was born prematurely, would have developmental problems.  He said he was told that Duo Duo would have cerebral palsy because he was born water in the brain.

Since posting the video on YouTube, “Eagle Daddy” was forced to justify his behavior.   His assistant told reporters that shortly before the child went out in the snow “he did half an hour of slow running to warm up.”

The assistant also said that the boy “has received all sorts of forms of training since he was small. When he was one, he started swimming in water that was 21 degrees Celsius.”

The assistant said that “Eagle Daddy” is not concerned about the negative responses he is receiving since posting the video online because “the fact that the child lived showed that he has tenacious vitality.”

Other reports say the child endures eight hours of daily exercise which includes swimming, mountain climbing, bicycle riding and martial arts.

Duo Duo is said to have a genius level IQ of 218.

Authorities in Papua New Guinea and Australia have sent boats to help in a search and rescue operations.

PNG Prime Minister Julia Gillard told reporters about 28 survivors were rescued from the MV Rabaul Queen, which is operated by Star Ships.

The ferry was traveling between the island of Kimbe and Lae when it went missing early Thursday morning.

Early reports say bad weather is to blame for the accident.

Sixty nine year old Phillip Bruce Shepard, who worked at a private Phnom Penh clinic, was arrested last July after the boys’ parents filed a complaint against him.

 Authorities began monitoring the Michigan native behavior and they caught him going into a hotel with two boys, whom he paid to have sex with.

The judge who sentenced Shepard also ordered that he is expelled from the country after he serves his time.

Five months after he was arrested, twenty-eight year old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, who served as an Arabic translator in the military, was convicted of “working for an enemy country…for membership in the CIA and also for his efforts to accuse Iran of involvement in terrorism.”

Hekmati, who served in the Marines from 2001 to 2005, was arrested last August while visiting his grandmother and other relatives in the Islamic Republic.

Both the US government and Hekmati’s family denied he was a spy and demanded his immediate release before his December 17 trial in Tehran.

His family said the U.S. born former Marine had recently started his own linguistics company and contracted his services to the military as well as civilian businesses. His military contracts included cultural competency training.

Reports say he was working with troops at military bases to promote understanding of, and positive communication, with people of other cultures.

Omar “El Gato” Ortiz is accused of using his celebrity status to get close to at least 20 wealthy Mexicans, including the husband of pop star Gloria Trevi, who were kidnapped by the cartels.

Authorities in the northeastern city of Monterrey said the 35-year-old athlete, who has been under a two year suspension from the Royados of Monterrey since April 2010 after testing positive for steroids, confessed to receiving payments for helping to select wealthy businessmen as targets in at least two kidnappings.

It is alleged that he received a $7,200 payment for each of his contributions.

Ortiz and three of his accomplices were arrested last week.  He faces up to 50 years in prison if convicted.

Trevi’s husband, Armando Gomez, was kidnapped last October while out with friends in Mexico City. He was released four days later.  It is unclear how much or if any money was paid for his return.

The 26-year-old woman was pushing her child in the city of Bryansk when the ground caved in underneath them.

Both mother and child went into the hole but the mother was rescued.  It is believed that the child was swept away by the current into a collecting tank for the sewage system.

Authorities are working to determine what caused Sunday’s accident.

Malkit Kaur Sidhu and her brother Surjit Singh Badesha were arrested Friday in the Vancouver suburb of Maple Ridge without incident.

The siblings will be held pending an extradition hearing.

Authorities say Sidhu had her 25-year-old daughter, Jassi Sidhu, killed after she married Mithu Sidhu, a man she had met in India during a visit.

The couple was secretly married because they knew Jassi Sidhu’s wealthy family in Canada would not have approved the marriage since her new husband did not have any money and drove a taxi called an auto rickshaw for a living.

Mithu Sidhu was seriously injured in the June 2000 attack that killed his bride.

The accident occurred around 7:30 a.m. Saturday (12:30 ET).

Reports say 5 couples and the pilot were aboard the balloon when it went up in flames.

One witness told reporters that she was outside watering her plants when she saw “a puff of smoke in the sky and then flames as the balloon fell to the earth.”

Another said he ran to the burning balloon to help those on board but by the time he got to them they were all dead.

The incident caused power cuts in the area for about 20 minutes.

Today’s incident is New Zealand’s worst air disaster since 1979 when an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight crashed into Mt. Erebus in Antarctica killing 275 passengers.

An Indonesian girl, who disappeared during the December 2004 tsunami, was reunited with her family this week.

The girl named Wati was eight years old when she was separated from her mother during the massive waves that hit their village in Ujong Baroh on the island of Sumatra.

Earlier this week, a friend of the girl’s grandfather contacted the family to say he had met a 15-year-old girl with similar features to Wati. On Wednesday, the girl’s grandfather, Ibrahim, met with the friend and the teenager. 

The teenager turned out to be Wati.

The friend said he found Wati sitting alone in a coffee bar, but when questioned about her identity she had no memory of who she was.

Wati’s parents were able to confirm that the teenager was their daughter after seeing a distinctive mole and scar on her elbow.

It remains unclear what happened to Wati in the seven years since she disappeared.

The 2004 tsunami triggered by an 8.9-magnitude earthquake in the Indian Ocean killed more than 150,000 people in several countries in southern Asia.