Tourists visiting Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, site of the 1989 violent crackdown on student demonstrators, will have to pass through a security check, a government official said today.

VIETNAM slaughtered thousands of birds in its two largest cities yesterday while China vowed to vaccinate its entire stock of 14 billion poultry against bird flu, with the government promising to help pay for the process.

China will vaccinate all of the country’s 14 billion poultry against bird flu, the country’s top veterinary official said today.

Fears that several people in China and Thailand had been infected with bird flu appear to have been proved groundless, but the region’s anxiety mounted as officials warned of more human infections unless the spread of the disease was curbed.

Bird flu killed more than five times as many migratory birds as previously reported in China’s west in an outbreak of apparently unprecedented scale, an agriculture official said yesterday, but he denied reports of human cases.

Seven priests of China’s underground Roman Catholic Church have been detained for attending an unauthorised retreat following the election of the new Pope, a US-based monitoring group said today.

The Beijing-based parent company of crisis-hit China Aviation Oil (Singapore) has refused to provide unconditional support to its troubled subsidiary, urging creditors to have realistic expectations.

A father slashed 25 children with a kitchen knife at a school in eastern China and held a nine-year-old girl hostage for an hour before police captured him.