SACRAMENTO, California (AP) – The tires of a JetBlue airplane caught fire Thursday during a hard landing in Sacramento that left 15 people with minor injuries and sent passengers down emergency slides to escape the aircraft.

Passenger Michelle McDuffie said people onboard felt a thud when the plane touched down at about 12:50 p.m. after a flight from Long Beach, but nobody thought there was an emergency until the crew shouted for everyone to exit on the inflatable slides.

McDuffie saw the burning tires when she was on the ground.

“I thought, Oh I wish I had gotten my bag off. But I was just happy that I wasn’t hurt,” said McDuffie, 33, of Mission Viejo.

The plane appeared to experience trouble with its brakes, and four tires blew out during the landing, airline spokeswoman Sharon Jones said.

Tiger found in plane luggage
BANGKOK (Reuters Life!) – Airport customs in Bangkok found a two-month-old tiger stashed in a bag, filled with stuffed tiger toys, which was checked-in for an international passenger flight, authorities said on Friday.

The dazed and drugged cub was concealed in an oversized bag packed with the toys and bound for Iran when it was discovered by Thai authorities using an x-ray machine at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport earlier this week.

A 31-year-old Thai woman was detained for questioning and was unable to explain why there was a real tiger in the bag. ‘’The woman trying to check in the oversized bag denied any knowledge of the tiger. She said she was carrying it for someone else,’’ Nirat Nipanand, an airport customs official in charge of tracking animal, told Reuters.

An investigation was underway and DNA samples were due to be taken to find out the species of the cub, which had been sedated with anti-depressants.

Kim Jong-Il may meet Hu
SEOUL (AFP) – North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Il may meet Chinese President Hu Jintao in northeastern China, where Kim arrived earlier, news reports said Friday.

A 30-vehicle convoy believed to be carrying Kim pulled up at a hotel in the city of Changchun after driving some 90 minutes from Jilin City, where the reclusive leader had stayed overnight, Yonhap news agency said.

Hotel officials said all guest rooms and meeting rooms at the Changchun hotel had been ‘’fully booked,’’ with one saying ‘’national-level meetings’’ were being held there. The officials said they did not know if Kim was there.

Yonhap quoted diplomatic sources as saying that Hu, who was also believed to be in northeastern China, may hold talks with Kim in Changchun.

Kim might be accompanied in northeastern China by his son, Kim Jong-Un, who is widely expected to be named to the North Korean communist leadership at a party meeting early next month.

Video shows trapped miners
COPIAPO, Chile (AP) – The first video released of the 33 men trapped deep in a Chilean cooper mine shows the men stripped to the waist and appearing slim but healthy, arm-in-arm, singing the national anthem and yelling “long live Chile, and long live the miners!”

Only about five minutes of what is reportedly a 45-minute video was released late Thursday by Television Nacional de Chile via the Chilean government.

The men made the video with a small camera sent down to them through a small emergency shaft drilled to their emergency shelter deep in the San Jose mine.

The grainy, night-vision images show some men standing, others lying down and apparently just waking up. One man proudly displays the way they have organized the living room-sized shelter where they took refuge after a landslide trapped them August 5.