■ AFRICA. Annan and head Gates team up. Former UN chief Kofi Annan said yesterday he would head a new green group bankrolled by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to help reverse Africa?s declining food production and double output. ?I am honoured today to take up this important post and join with my fellow Africans in a new effort to comprehensively tackle the challenges holding back hundreds millions of small-scale farmers in Africa,? Annan told a news briefing. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa said Annan would be its first chairman. The Alliance was set up last year with an initial $150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. The group, which is an African initiative, will help small-scale farmers and their families across Africa fight poverty and hunger through sustainable increases in farm productivity and incomes from its base in Nairobi, Kenya.

■ MANILA. Arroyo vows to end Philippine journalist killings. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo promised yesterday to end a series of killings of Philippine journalists, asking prosecutors and police to solve such crimes speedily and bring the guilty to justice. Fifty-two journalists have been killed since 2001 when Arroyo was swept into power after an army-backed revolt. Hundreds of leftists and opponents of the government have also been killed in what rights groups say is a systematic pattern of intimidation. Although the discussion centred on killings of journalists, Arroyo said the effort would extend to leftists and government opponents as well. A UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings said in February that the Philippines? military was responsible for many of the deaths. Rights groups say up to 800 people have been killed since Arroyo came to power.

■ BEIJING. China bans ?vulgar? school art competitions. China has banned schools from organising ?vulgar? beauty, art or talent shows, worried they may corrupt young minds and simply be used to extract money from parents, state media said yesterday. ?There are more and more children wearing special outfits and singing pop songs on stage or television screens,? the official Xinhua news agency said, citing new rules from the Ministry of Education. ?Art education is about cultivating children?s minds to appreciate beauty, not to train up ?little stars?,? it said in a report on its Web site .

?The rules are to oppose the ?adultisation? of artistic activities, the ?vulgarisation? of campus culture and other harmful tendencies,? Xinhua added. In January, the government shut a dancing school in the southwestern Guangxi region which sent underage students half way across the country to work as bar girls.

■ TRIPOLI. Gaddafi, Mugabe want federal government for Africa. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and visiting Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe want African leaders to agree next month to unite Africa under one government to help it solve its own problems, state media said yesterday.

The two men, both among the world?s longest serving leaders, agreed in talks in Tripoli on Wednesday that the 53-nation African Union (AU) should be turned into an embryonic federal government at an AU heads of state summit in Ghana on July 1-2. Gaddafi has long favoured the establishment of a United States of Africa as a means of ridding the continent of 800 million people of what he calls Western colonialism. The project attracts emotional support from some in Africa since the idea of a federal United States of Africa was first promoted by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana?s first president and pioneer of Pan-Africanism, but many doubt its practicality. The topic is due to be debated at the Ghana gathering, which will take place 50 years after Ghana became the first black nation in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence. Zimbabwe had received oil from Libya under a $360 million loan facility which the southern African country was meant to repay in part by supplying agricultural produce to Tripoli, but the deal collapsed in late 2002 after Harare failed to meet its obligations. The facility, which covered 70 percent of Zimbabwe?s fuel needs, had run for less than a year. Zimbabwe is in the midst of an economic crisis that has produced the world?s highest inflation rate of above 3,700 percent, unemployment of around 80 percent and chronic shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency.

■ JAKARTA Indonesia man becomes 80th bird flu victim-official. A 29-year-old Indonesian man has died of bird flu, a top health official said yesterday, taking the country?s human death toll to 80. Bayu Krisnamurthi, the head of the country?s commission on bird flu control, made the comments in a news conference. Separately, Suharda Ningrum of the health ministry?s bird flu centre said the man from Indragiri Hulu in Riau Province in Sumatra died on Tuesday.

■ LONDON. Doctors believe overfeeding children is abuse. Obesity has figured as a factor in 20 child protection cases this year and some doctors now think that overfeeding children could be seen as a form of abuse, acording to a study by the BBC yesterday. The BBC said its findings were based on a survey of about 50 consultant paediatricians around Britain.

Earlier this year, the case of an obese eight-year-old boy hit the headlines after social workers threatened to take him away from his parents because of concerns about his weight. Studies show Britain has the worst rate of obesity among children in Europe and the country?s media regulator plans to ban television advertising for junk food aimed at school-age children from next year.