■ SOUTH KOREA
Cull planned of 5.3m birds
Seoul yesterday said it planned to cull a record 5.3 million birds as it announced its 17th case of bird flu in three weeks, in what has become the country’s fastest and biggest outbreak of avian influenza. The nation has culled 4.86 million chickens and ducks since the beginning of the month, as the highly virulent H5N1 strain, first reported in the southwest, has been confirmed in five provinces.
■ CHINA
Rain forces evacuations
Authorities evacuated about 200 people living near the Three Gorges Dam because of a landslide that followed heavy rains, state media and local officials said yesterday. The landslide hit on Sunday in Hubei Province, inundating 37 homes and a primary school with rocks and mud, the Xinhua news agency said. Residents were evacuated to a temporary shelter before the landslide hit and no casualties were reported. A government official said the landslide began on Saturday afternoon.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Sex killers may face death
The justice ministry on Sunday drafted a bill that could punish child sex killers with the death penalty after a high-profile crime that rocked the nation, officials said. The bill, made public by Yonhap news agency, stipulates that people who sexually assault and then kill children aged under 13 would face either the death penalty or imprisonment until they die. No one has been executed in South Korea for 10 years and activists have called for the death penalty to be formally scrapped. But the bill was prompted by a case where two girls aged 11 and nine were kidnapped, raped and murdered in December. Their bodies were found cut up and buried several months later.
■SOUTH KOREA
Cloned dogs start sniffing
The world’s first cloned sniffer dogs have begun training and will be ready to report for duty this year, customs officials said yesterday. Seven cloned puppies named Toppy (“Tomorrow’s puppy”) were born late last year to three surrogate mothers under a state-funded project, the Korea Customs Service said. The Toppies have passed the first round of tests for behavioral patterns and genetic qualities, it said. “They will report for duty in June after completing a second round of training,” customs spokesman Lee Ho said. The 300 million won (US$301,205) project was carried out by Lee Byung-chun, who played a key role in the world’s first successful cloning of a dog by creating a duplicate of a three-year-old Afghan Hound. Lee used the nuclei of somatic cells from sniffer dog Chase, a Golden Retriever, to clone the puppies.
■ MYANMAR
Bombs explode in Yangon
Two bombs exploded on Sunday in the country’s biggest city, witnesses said, but no casualties were reported. The witnesses, who insisted on anonymity for fear of official reprisal, said the first blast occurred on a downtown Yangon street at around 8pm. The second took place about an hour later on a different street near the luxurious Traders Hotel, the witnesses said. There was no known claim of responsibility and authorities did not immediately mention any suspects or confirm what caused the blasts. The first bomb damaged a car that it was hidden under, said witnesses who live nearby. They said the other bomb was also placed under a car. No other details of either blast were available. Few people were in the streets at the time. Security and riot police quickly blocked off both blast sites. Terrorism is rare in Myanmar, which has been under near-continuous military rule since 1962.
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