Experts have began setting up a bird flu early warning system by mapping routes that are taken by migrating species and places where they rest during their annual travel, United Nations officials said today.

Urgent investment is needed in North Korea to deal with serious environmental problems that have depleted the country’s forests, contaminated water supplies and polluted the air, the United Nations’ top environmental official has said.

According to the UN, all the apes gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orang-utans face a very high risk of extinction within 50 years at most.

A THREE-KILOMETRE deep blanket of sooty pollution stretching across southern Asia threatens to inflict untold economic damage to the region and put hundreds of thousands of people at risk, scientists said yesterday.