A 20-day-old baby has been found alive floating on a mattress in her parent's damaged restaurant in northern Malaysia.
S Tulasi was sleeping in a room at the restaurant when the huge waves struck on Sunday in the holiday resort of Penang. The swirling waters swept her parents out of the restaurant.
Luckily however, they later managed to claw their way back to the badly damaged building.
"Thank God the mattress was floating in about 1.5-metre (5ft) -deep water and my baby was crying," the baby's father, A. Suppiah, told the national news agency Bernama.
Malaysia has suffered a fraction of the death and destruction wrought on neighbouring countries -the toll there is just 65, according to the latest police figures, although the west coast is the closest neighbour to the Indonesian island of Sumatra, which bore the brunt of the disaster.
The secret to Malaysia's miracle lies in Sumatra itself, experts say. The epicentre of the quake lay just west of Sumatra's northern tip, meaning that as the tsunamis set off on their deadly course across the oceans the island acted as a buffer for Malaysia.
"Malaysia is lucky. We were protected by Sumatra island," Low Kong Chiew, director of the state-run Seismology Division told AFP. "If it weren't for the Sumatra island, it would have been a different story."
Helmut Kohl rescued in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka’s air force evacuated Helmut Kohl, the former German Chancellor, from the hotel where he was stranded in southern tsunami-hit Sri Lanka, the air force commander said.
Herr Kohl was on a private holiday and was not injured in Sunday’s massive tidal waves, a spokesman in Berlin said. A Sri Lankan helicopter collected him and six other people from his hotel in Thalpe and brought them to the German embassy in Colombo.
Thalpe is close to Sri Lanka’s worst-hit southern port city of Galle, where several thousand people were killed. "He had been stranded and asking for assistance," the air force commander, Air Marshal Donald Perera, told The Associated Press.
A spokesman in Berlin said that Herr Kohl would stay in Sri Lanka. "He is fine and has been brought to safety. The way it looks now, he will continue his stay in Sri Lanka," he said.
Internet link for Swedish boy
Viola Hellstroem was scouring a website with pictures of tidal-wave victims in Thailand when she came across a familiar face. The 2-year-old-toddler, seemingly unharmed and smiling in the arms of a hospital nurse was her nephew, Hannes Bergstroem.
The boy's identity had mystified doctors since he was found sitting on a road not far from the town of Khao Lak in Phang Nga province, shortly after surging waves swept away thousands of people.
"I screamed for joy," Hellstroem told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet after she spotted her nephew's picture on the Phuket Gazette newspaper in Thailand. "We thought he was dead."
The boy's father and paternal grandfather reportedly have been found in a another hospital, while his mother and paternal grandmother were still missing. About 20,000 Swedish tourists were in Thailand when the quake struck, the Swedish Foreign Ministry said, and more than 1,500 were still unaccounted for.
Ms Hellstroem told Aftonbladet the family had been travelling through Thailand for a month, and was spending the last days of their vacation in Khao Lak before returning home to Goteborg, in southeast Sweden.
Text message campaign saves Britons
Thirty six stranded British tourists caught up in the tsunami in Sri Lanka were rescued after local telephone companies used technology to pin-point one of their mobile phones.
The Britons were picked up from the southern beach resort of Hikkaduwa where they were stranded after Sunday's seismic wave lashed three-quarters of the island's coastline, killing more than 17,000 people in the island state.
A private initiative involving all phone companies in Sri Lanka began monitoring mobile phones with international roaming and traced the call patterns to figure out the location of the phone users.
"There were 10,252 international roaming phones working on Sri Lankan networks at the time of the tragedy," Chris Dharmakirti, who is heading the Tidal Wave Rescue Centre said."We sent everyone an SMS and got responses from 2,321."
He said 5,983 roaming phones had gone dead since the disaster while 4,269 phones had been used to make at least one call after the tragedy.
"Whenever anyone used the phone, we could track where the person was and restrict our search to affected areas of the country. If a phone is dead it could be that the unit is lost or the person is affected by the tragedy," Mr Dharmakirti said. "But, we are keeping a track on these numbers."
He said they sent instructions to the phone users to call a toll-free local number that will be answered by a call centre manned by some 100 people.
"Last night we had a response from a British tourist and based on tracking his call we were able to locate a total of 36 stranded Britons," Mr Dharmakirti said."Four of them were critically wounded, but we managed to get to them to safety."
Phuket marriage goes ahead
A British couple will go ahead with plans to get married in Phuket, unfazed by the trail of destruction unleashed by killer tidal waves that hit the popular Thai island.
Marc Singleton, 43, a motoring consultant and his fiancee Lucinda Semark, 35, flew to Phuket from Singapore for their Wednesday wedding at Cape Panwa Hotel on the southeastern tip of the island which was relatively unscathed by the tidal waves.
"It's going ahead as planned. They will enjoy a Thai style wedding in the morning with monks, then go to Phang Nga bay on a speedboat, sail on a traditional Chinese junk, and come back for cocktails and fireworks here at the hotel," a guest relations manager told AFP.
"They've brought a lot of friends," he said, adding that hotel staff were working hard to raise the spirits of everyone at the resort.
"Apart from the fact that many people are sitting by the beach instead of swimming, everything seems fine," Singleton told Singapore's Straits Times newspaper.
"Just being here, you wouldn't know disaster had struck the west coast," he said.
Lucky escape for sports stars
Holidaying sports stars from around the world were also caught up in the tragedy. The three-times World Cup ski champion and Olympic gold medallist Ingemar Stenmark was sunbathing on a beach in Thailand when he saw an immense wave roaring to shore. He began running for his life. "The water from the first wave disappeared, but then it came back with terrifying speed," Stenmark said. He and his girlfriend were not injured.
Several Italian football players on their Christmas break in the Maldives were also stranded, but unhurt. The AC Milan striker Filippo Inzaghi sent a text message from his cell phone to Gazzetta dello Sport saying he was "isolated but OK for now," adding he was without lights and water.
