■ China
Traffic accident kills 24
Twenty-four people were killed when a speeding truck collided with a long-distance bus near Beijing's Badaling Great Wall tourist site, state press said yesterday. The accident occurred on Sunday evening as both vehicles were heading into the capital, Xinhua news agency said. Nine others were injured in the accident. According to initial investigations, the speeding truck lost control before ploughing into the bus. Both vehicles exploded in flames after they went spiralling into a ditch on the side of the road, it said. China's roads are the world's deadliest, with more than 107,000 people killed in accidents last year, according to previously released government statistics.
■ China
Highways threaten pandas
The endangered giant panda is facing a new threat from the rapid expansion of the national highway network, which is well on the way to cutting its natural habitat into tiny pieces, state media said yesterday. The problem is at its most serious in Gansu Province, where new highways have separated the local panda population of 100 into five different habitats. This could spell doom for the Gansu panda, since research shows groups of fewer than 50 animals will sooner or later die out as inbreeding weakens their reproductive ability. Conservationists are scratching their heads to come up with a solution, and some have suggested tunnels under the highways or even special traffic controls to allow pandas to pass from one habitat to the other. The Chinese are fighting an uphill battle to preserve the giant panda, partly because of the furry animal's notorious lack of interest in sex.
■ Japan
Police study Web for clues
Police searching for the killer of a seven-year-old girl are studying Internet bulletin board messages boasting of a plan to kidnap a girl after school, Jiji Press reported yesterday. The murder of Yuki Yoshida, whose stabbed naked body was found on Friday in bushes in central Ibaraki Prefecture, further fueled public outrage 10 days after a girl of the same age was strangled to death in western Japan. "I will be promoted from a would-be-criminal to a criminal. I am drawing up a plan to snatch a grade-school girl," said a message on an Internet site being probed by police, it reported. Police have tracked down the alleged killer of the first girl, a Peruvian.
■ Philippines
Left-wing activist slain
Two unidentified men yesterday fatally shot a left-wing activist as she stepped out of a meeting with farmers and fishermen west of Manila. A witness reported seeing two men on a motorcycle firing guns at Cathy Alcantara, 43, an official of the Movement for National Democracy (KPD), in Abucay, Bataan, 50km west of Manila. KPD spokeswoman Jo Ocampo said Alcantara's killing was similar to recent assassinations of other group activists. "We believe it's part of extra-judicial killings perpetrated against people's organizations by either the military, the police or the `black army' or death squad organized to silence groups protesting against the government," she said.
■ Sri Lanka
Tamil Tigers issue threat
A group allied with the Tamil Tiger rebels threatened yesterday to force the military and "traitors" from the country's Tamil-dominated northeast if violence continues against the ethnic group there. The statement from the Trincomalee Tamil Peoples Consortium followed a weekend of violence during which a Muslim mob beat two Tamil men to death in Trincomalee. "The day when paramilitaries and traitors must run away from our land is not very far," it said. "When the anger of the Tamil people at these lowly acts bursts out, we warn that the traitors will be forced to run with the Sri Lankan military from our land," it said.
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