News from Malaysia says that motorists driving along the East-West Highway in particular the stretch of road leading to Banding and Kota Baru in the east coast must not honk or switch on the car headlights when they come across elephants on the road. Perak Wildlife and National Parks Department director Shabrina Mohd Shariff said…

Europe From a Backpack series travel books have just published Italy From a Backpack and Spain From a Backpack. This is how the publishers describe the Europe Backpack books: despite their numbers, few, if any travel books have told their stories. Now, we have collected the best from more than 1,000 submissions. They cover a…

News from Italy reaches the Beetle of cheese raids, with criminal gangs hijacking lorries containing wheels of Parmesan cheese, cutting them up and selling them to stores. The Italian farmers’ union is experimenting with microchips which can be hidden in cheese crusts and then traced by satellite.

According to a recent UN report, up to 30% of girls in some Kenyan resorts are involved in the sex industry. The UN children’s fund UNICEF, which looked at resorts along Kenya’s coast, found that 15,000 girls aged 12 to 18, said to live in the resort areas districts of Mombassa, Kilifi, Malindi and Kwale…

China is to build a 1,315 km railway line running north – south connecting Nigeria’s two main commercial cities, Lagos and Kano. Nigeria’s leader President Olusegun Obasanjo said the five-year railway line was the first phase in a 20-year modernisation programme. The existing railway along these routes has fallen into disrepair and new tracks are…

Australia’s Treasurer Peter Costello has said there is “no point” Australia signing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change unless it applies to China and India too. Australia, like the US, has refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement which places curbs on greenhouse emissions.

We normally associate Venezuela’s president Snr Hugo Chavez with outrageous pronouncements. Peru’s President, Alan Garcia has entered the fray for the title of most controversial remarks: he recently suggested that the coca leaf, from which the drug cocaine is derived, should be used in cooking and salads – that coca leaves had many valuable uses,…

The South Korean government is offering movie tickets to office workers as well as a cash prize of 1 million won ($1,077) to the company which enlists the most employees in the campaign – to promise not to visit brothels this holiday season. “If you promise yourself to make it a healthy night out at…

Womankind Worldwide, an international women’s rights group says guarantees given to Afghan women after the fall of the Taleban in 2001 have not translated into real change. It believes many are the result of forced marriages, thought to account for about 60% to 80% of all Afghan marriages. 57% of girls are married before the…

An overweight passenger has sued Air France after being told he was too fat and had to pay for a second seat to accommodate him. Jean-Jacques Jauffret, a French scriptwriter, said that he had felt humiliated by Air France staff that had measured his waist in public at New Delhi Airport in 2005 and decided…