Manila

A strong typhoon off the Philippines’ mountainous north forced authorities to close schools in the capital for a second day on Thursday as disaster-response teams braced for possible floods and landslides. Typhoon Sepat was roaring over the Pacific Ocean with sustained winds of 185km/h and gusts of up to 220km/h.

There may be "Aida" and even some "Fans" — but the jumble of Asean acronyms isn’t music to anyone’s ears. For the hundreds of reporters who can’t tell their Aasroc from their Elto, the blizzard of bureaucracy at the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) meetings can be pretty daunting.

The Roman Catholic Church in Manila has laid down a dress code after parishioners complained they were being distracted by women wearing skimpy shorts, plunging necklines and men wearing sports jerseys during Mass. The Manila archdiocese in this predominantly Roman Catholic country issued guidelines recently to all churches in Manila.

Traffic accidents worldwide claim about 1,2-million lives a year and injure millions more, the World Health Organisation said on Monday. Every day 1 000 people under the age of 25 are killed in traffic accidents, with 90% of these deaths occurring in low to middle-income countries mainly in Africa and Asia, it said.

Parents of dozens of Philippine children held captive this week by the man who operated their day-care centre held a protest rally on Thursday to urge the government to free him and another man behind the hostage drama. Parents and residents at the Parola compound in one of Manila’s poor slum communities said they were pressing no criminal complaints.

Two armed men took over a bus in the Philippine capital Manila on Wednesday and were holding 31 nursery school children and two teachers hostage, apparently to highlight corruption in the country. The gunmen, believed to be armed with grenades, an Uzi submachine gun and a revolver, freed one child who was running a fever in a three-hour stand-off.

More than 41 000 Filipino schoolchildren on Wednesday brushed their teeth simultaneously in three cities in the Philippines in a bid to break a world record, organisers said. A total of 41 038 children gathered in open parks in Manila, the central city of Cebu and the southern city of Davao to make the bid successful.

A German tourist appeared in a Manila court Monday charged with "alarm and scandal and acts of lasciviousness" after he dropped his trousers and walked through an X-ray machine at Manila’s international airport. Hans Jurgen Oskar von Naguschewski (66) was so annoyed when asked to walk through the machine for a second time that he dropped his trousers, police said.

A packed bus was ripped apart and at least 26 people killed when it took the full force of a gas-truck explosion on a highway in the southern Philippines, officials said on Friday. The delivery truck, which was carrying liquefied petroleum gas, overturned after its brakes failed.

Twenty-five Christmas shoppers were killed, including a pregnant woman and two babies, when a fire swept through a packed store in the central Philippines, the Office of Civil Defence said on Tuesday. The fire struck the Unitop General Merchandising Store in Ormoc City, about 550km south-east of Manila, on Monday when predominantly Catholic Philippines were celebrating Christmas Day.

Typhoon Utor departed the central Philippines overnight, leaving five people dead, 20 missing, nearly 90 000 evacuated and two key regional summits in disarray, officials said on Monday. The mass evacuations were ordered to avoid a repeat of the devastation of Typhoon Durian a week earlier.

Manila airport officials prevented a real life version of horror flick Snakes on a Plane this week when they stopped more than 130 reptiles, including poisonous cobras, from boarding a flight to Bangkok. Dozens of lizards and 60 snakes concealed in water bottles were discovered on Tuesday inside two suitcases belonging to a Filipino woman, airport officials said.

More than 8 000 people were evacuated from their homes as Typhoon Chebi departed from the Philippines on Sunday, moving further west into the South China Sea. The typhoon left two people injured and forced about 8 280 people in San Jose City in the northern Philippines to flee to evacuation centres due to flooding, the civil defence office said.

Typhoon Chebi was on course to hit the north-eastern Philippines early on Saturday, promising to become the second to slam the country in as many weeks. Authorities upgraded Chebi from a tropical storm on Friday and told residents to brace for possible floods and landslides.

To the coffee connoisseur, apparently, it is the ultimate brew — right to the very last dropping. Civet coffee, made from beans excreted by the weasel-like animal, is said to be the most valuable coffee in the world. Twenty-five grams can sell for more than and despite the price coffee lovers cannot get enough.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Thursday called on governments to improve air quality in their cities, saying air pollution prematurely kills two million people a year, with more than half the deaths in developing countries. Reducing the kind of pollution known as PM10 — or particulate matter with particles of smaller than 10 micrometers — could save as many as 300 000 lives every year.

Three Filipino energy industry workers kidnapped in Nigeria have been freed and handed over to Philippine embassy officials, the foreign department said on Monday. Cornelio Fallaria (51), Daniel Monteagudo (49) and Alberto Torres (50) were turned over to embassy officials, Foreign Undersecretary Esteban Conejos told reporters.

Strong winds and giant waves, boosted by a south-west monsoon, have wiped out hundreds of shacks on stilts and left thousands of people homeless in the southern Philippines, local government officials said on Thursday. A number of people were missing after giant waves swept four coastal villages out to sea.

Twenty Filipino seamen kidnapped by pirates in Somalia in March have been released and are on their way home, officials said on Monday. The men were freed unharmed on Saturday, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether any ransom had been paid, said Roy Cimatu, the government’s special envoy to the Middle East.

One of the Philippines’ most active volcanoes continued spewing ash overnight, raising fears of a possible eruption and leaving one man dead, officials said on Saturday. The Philippine Institute of Vulcanology and Seismology said an explosion from the 1 565m summit of Bulusan sent ash and steam 1km into the air and showered ash on surrounding villages.

The World Health Organisation on Tuesday accused the global tobacco industry of continuing to use misleading labels to lure millions of people, including children, to take up smoking. On the eve of World No Tobacco Day, WHO said it would focus on the "tobacco industry’s lies" and the great variety of deadly tobacco products.

The Philippines began cleaning up on Sunday after tropical storm Chanchu claimed 32 lives, left large parts of the country under water and forced thousands to flee their homes. By midday on Sunday Chanchu was 430km out in the South China Sea, charting a west-south-westerly course and packing winds of up to 140kph, according to the weather bureau.