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.
Six road workers kidnapped by al-Qaeda-linked Muslim extremists were found beheaded on Thursday in the southern Philippine island of Jolo, the military said. The severed heads of the six mostly Christian workers were found in the jungles of Jolo by soldiers, four days after the workers were seized, said Major General Ruben Rafael.
Fighting between government forces and Muslim rebels is spreading in the southern Philippines, shattering hopes for peace and threatening local support for a United States-backed campaign to flush out militants. Army commandos were on Tuesday fanning out into the jungles of Jolo island to hunt members of the Moro National Liberation Front.
Victor showed no fear, smoking a cigarette, waiting in line for his turn on the cross. But he cried out and openly wept as the 13cm stainless-steel nails — pre-soaked in alcohol to disinfect them — were driven through his palms with an ordinary carpenter’s hammer.
More than a dozen Filipinos were nailed to crosses and scores more whipped their backs into a bloody pulp on Friday in a gory ritual to mark the death of Jesus Christ. The voluntary crucifixions were the most extreme displays of religious devotion in this mainly Catholic country, where millions are praying and fasting ahead of the Easter weekend.
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.
A Philippine pre-school head surrendered to police on Wednesday after holding a busload of his own students hostage with a hand grenade and other weapons in what he said was an appeal to help them. Amando "Jun" Ducat was taken away by police after the 10-hour stand-off on a school bus on the streets of Manila.
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.
"There is no right or wrong way," the trail master tells his nine fellow bushwalkers as they trace a little-known passage through the Philippines’ Sierra Madre range. "But whining is not allowed." The city slickers enter a different world in the sleepy village of Daraitan just 50km east of Manila. Here there are no roads, no bridges, no electricity, no telephones, and no 24-hour convenience stores.
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/ 23 February 2007
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.
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/ 16 February 2007
Ricardo Sibunga works tirelessly under a steady downpour, his sweat and tears mixing as he and 20 men and women race against time to finish a small chapel on a muddy patch that was once a thriving farming village in the central Philippines. They work with manual tools, hauling sand and bricks from a river bed 1km away, a token sacrifice for a monument to honour over 1Â 000 of their friends.
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/ 12 February 2007
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.
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/ 2 February 2007
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.
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/ 10 January 2007
Bombs exploded in two southern Philippine cities on Wednesday, killing at least six people and wounding dozens, days before a summit meeting of leaders from 16 Asian nations gets under way. Western governments have warned of bomb attacks by Islamic militants during the summit from January 13 to 15.
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/ 26 December 2006
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.
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/ 11 December 2006
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.
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/ 9 December 2006
A typhoon swept into the central Philippines on Saturday, a day after it forced the government to hastily shelve a gathering of Asian leaders on a resort island south of the storm’s projected path. Typhoon Utor is the second storm to batter the archipelago in as many weeks and brought gusts of up to 150kph and heavy rain to the island of Samar, about 600km south-east of Manila.
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/ 8 December 2006
The threat of a possible terrorist attack was the main reason for postponing a South-east Asian summit due to start on Sunday on the Philippine island of Cebu, foreign ministry sources said. The Philippines government earlier blamed a building tropical storm in the Pacific for calling off the summit.
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/ 6 December 2006
Workers shifted tonnes of sand and volcanic rock on Wednesday to open up vital lifelines to isolated eastern Philippines hamlets days after mudslides left more than 1 200 dead and missing. Restoring roads and electricity networks to bring help to desperate survivors is now the priority after the worst-affected Bicol peninsula in the Luzon region recovered and buried its dead from Typhoon Durian.
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/ 5 December 2006
The first foreign aid flights of food and medicines arrived on Tuesday in the eastern Philippines, where officials said devastating mudslides have left more than 1Â 080 people dead or missing. The devastating torrents of mud and volcanic ash triggered by typhoon rains swallowed entire villages near Mount Mayon volcano last Thursday.
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/ 4 December 2006
The Philippines fears up to 1 000 people have been killed in landslides and flooding triggered by Typhoon Durian but officials said on Monday that many of the bodies might never be retrieved. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared a state of national calamity after Durian, which was set to hit the Vietnamese coast on Monday.
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/ 3 December 2006
Villagers in the central Philippines buried hundreds of relatives and friends in mass graves on Sunday as hopes faded of finding survivors from Typhoon Durian. Officials fear the death toll from Durian, which swept into the South China Sea on Friday, could reach 600 after torrential rain and winds of up to 225kph sent waves of mud crashing down an active volcano into nearby villages.
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/ 2 December 2006
Distraught survivors searched piles of bodies for the faces of their loved ones in the central Philippines on Saturday after landslides triggered by Typhoon Durian left hundreds dead. Driving rain and winds of up to 225kph dislodged tonnes of mud and boulders from the slopes of Mount Mayon, an active volcano about 320km south of Manila.
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/ 30 November 2006
A powerful typhoon battered the eastern Philippines on Thursday with winds of up to 190kph, cutting off power to thousands of homes. The ”super typhoon” — the fourth to hit the Philippines in as many months — was packing gusts of up to 225kph, the Philippine weather bureau said.
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/ 22 November 2006
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.
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/ 12 November 2006
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.
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/ 10 November 2006
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.
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/ 30 October 2006
Typhoon Cimaron whipped a deadly trail on Monday across the northern Philippines, blowing away houses and triggering landslides and floods that killed at least four people. Hundreds of families were forced to evacuate their homes as Cimaron, one of the strongest typhoons to strike the Philippines in recent years, pounded the northern part of Luzon Island.
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/ 16 October 2006
While tourists frolic in the crystal-clear waters lapping the tropical island of Boracay, local natives forced from their land by developers are fighting for their piece of paradise lost. With its warm blue waters, powder-fine white sand and palm-fringed beach, Boracay, in the central Philippines, is widely regarded as having one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.
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.
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/ 29 September 2006
Typhoon Xangsane churned towards Vietnam on Friday after killing 31 people in the Philippines, injuring hundreds and leaving a trail of widespread destruction. In Manila, the stock exchange, currency market, schools and government offices remained closed for a second day as a huge mopping-up operation began. Slightly more than half of the main island of Luzon was still without power.