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The Associated Press TOKYO At least 15 people were killed and about 20 wounded in a knife attack Tuesday at a facility for the handicapped in a city just outside Tokyo in the worst mass killing in generations in Japan. Police said they re- sponded to a call about 2:30 a.m. from an employee say- ing something horrible was happening at the facility in the city of Sagamihara, west of Tokyo. A man turned himself in at a police station about two hours later, police in Sagamihara said. He left the knife in his car when he entered the station. He has been arrested on suspi- cion of attempted murder and trespassing. Police saidthereweresev- eral casualties but did not provide any numbers. NHK said 15 people were killed and 20 were wounded, while Kyodo News service put the death toll at 19, in- cluding four who were crit- ically injured and later de- clared dead. A woman who lives across from the facility told Japanese broadcaster NHK that she saw police cars en- ter the facility around 3:30 a.m. "I was told by a police- man to stay inside my house, as it could be dan- gerous," she said. "Then am- bulances began arriving, and blood-covered people were taken away." NHK reported the sus- pect, 26, is a former em- ployee at the facility, Tsu- kui Yamayuri-en. Another broadcaster, NTV, said he broke into the facility by smashing a window with a hammer, and that he was upset because he had been fired, but that could not be independently confirmed. Television footage showed a number of ambu- lances parked outside the facility, with medical and other rescue workers run- ning in and out. Mass killings are rela- tively rare in Japan, which has extremely strict gun- control laws. In 2008, seven people were killed by a man who slammed a truck into a crowd of people in cen- tral Tokyo's Akihabara elec- tronics district and then stabbed passers-by. Fourteen were injured in 2010 by an unemployed man who stabbed and beat up passengers on two pub- lic buses outside a Japa- nese train station in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 25 miles northeast of Tokyo. JAPAN Atleast15killed,about20 injured in knifing near Tokyo KYODONEWS A police officer talks with visitors in front of a facility for the handicapped where a number of people were killed in a knife attack Tuesday in Sagamihara, outside Tokyo. By Malcolm Ritter The Associated Press NEW YORK If you want to see a tall population of men, go to the Nether- lands. Tall women? Latvia. And in the United States, which lags behind dozens of other countries in height, the average for adults stopped increasing about 20 years ago. That's the word from re- searchers who analyzed a century's worth of height data from 200 countries. Results were released Mon- day in the journal eLife. National height averages are useful as an indicator of nutrition, health care, environment and general health that people have ex- perienced from the womb through adolescence, said Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London, who led the research. Genes also influence height. The researchers calcu- lated average height for 18 year olds, roughly the age when people stop growing. They drew on more than 1,400 studies that covered more than 18.6 million adults who reached that age between 1914 and 2014. Experts said the results generally agree with what others have reported be- fore. The tallest men in the new analysis were Dutch, with an average height of about 6 feet. The next nine tallest countries in or- der for men were Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croa- tia, Serbia, Iceland and the Czech Republic. Latvia topped the list for women, with an av- erage height of 5-foot-6. Rounding out the top 10 were the Netherlands, Es- tonia, the Czech Repub- lic, Serbia, Slovakia, Den- mark, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Over the century-long span of the study, the big- gest gains appeared in South Korean women and Iranian men, who added 8 inches and 6 ½ inches, re- spectively. There was little change in South Asia and some sub-Saharan African countries. In the U.S., men gained about 2 ½ inches over the century, with about 2 inches for women. The na- tion is now the 37th tall- est for men and 42nd for women, researchers said. The analysis estimated that average height for U.S. 18 year olds maxed out at about 5-foot-10 for men in 1996, and at about 5-foot-5 for women in 1988. Since then height has stalled but not decreased signif- icantly, said James Ben- tham of Imperial College London, a study author. Most Western countries, including the Netherlands, also have hit a plateau, al- though the U.S. reached it early, researchers said. The researchers didn't investigate the causes of the U.S. stagnation. But John Komlos, a visiting professor of economics at Duke University in Dur- ham, North Carolina, said there could be several rea- sons. He didn't participate in the new study but has previously studied height. Komlos suggested such factors as lack of health in- surance, shortfalls in medi- calandprenatalcare,under- weight and preterm babies from teenage pregnancies, and a rise in obesity, which leads to earlier puberty and so stoppage of growth. Theshortestfemalepop- ulation in the study is in Guatemala, at an average of 4-foot-11. It is followed in order by the Philippines, Bangladesh, Nepal, East Timor, Madagascar, Laos, the Marshall Islands, India and Indonesia. SCIENCE Up there: Netherlands, Latvia lead world for people's height By Vijay Joshi and Daniel Malloy The Associated Press VIENTIANE, LAOS China scored an unequivocal dip- lomatic victory Monday, preventing Southeast Asia's main grouping from criti- cizing it for territorially ex- panding in the South China Sea, even though some of the bloc's members are vic- tims of Beijing's actions. After hectic negotia- tions, the 10 members of the Association of South- east Asian Nations issued a watered-down rebuke that amounted to less than a slap on the wrist, and ex- posed the deep divisions in a regional body that prides itself on unity. In a joint communi- que released after their talks, the foreign minis- ters of ASEAN said only that they "remain seriously concerned over recent and ongoing developments" in the South China Sea. The statement did not mention China by name in referring to the developments. Most significantly, it failed to mention a recent ruling by an international arbitration panel in a dis- pute between the Philip- pines and China that said Beijing's claims in the South China Sea were illegal and that the Philippines was justifiably the aggrieved party. China has dismissed the ruling as bogus, saying the Hague-based tribunal has no authority to rule on what Beijing calls bilateral disputes. China wants di- rect negotiations with the Philippines instead. The tribunal's award "amounts to prescribing a dose of wrong medicine ... and it seems that certain countries outside the re- gion have got all worked up, keeping the fever high," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, referring to the United States. "And if the prescription is wrong it will not help cure any dis- ease. That's why we urge other counties in the region to lower the temperature," he told a news conference after 90 minutes of talks with the ASEAN ministers. Wang said about 80 per- cent of that time was spent on ASEAN-China relations, and only 20 percent on South China Sea. He joked that reporters had expended more than 80 percent of the question-and-answer time on South China Sea. China was able to push through its stance in ASEAN with the help of Cambodia, and to some ex- tent Laos, both of which are close friends of Beijing. ASEAN's guiding principle is to make all statements by consensus, so a veto by Cambodia would have pre- vented a more stinging re- buke. SEA DISPUTE TALKS China scores diplomatic victory, avoids ASEAN criticism P.O.Box220 Red Bluff, CA 96080 Support our classrooms, keep kids reading. DONATE YOUR VACATION newspaper dollars to the Newspaper In Education Program HELP OUR CHILDREN Formoredetailscall Circulation Department (530) 737-5047 ThroughtheNewspapersinEducation program, area classrooms receive the Red Bluff Daily News every day thanks to the generosity of these local businesses & individuals. 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