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 the advice was among other tips put up on a signboard to inform motorists on what to do in such a situation. The signboards, she said, were put up following reports of elephants straying onto the highway located next to the Belum Forest Reserve, which is the elephants’ habitat. “By honking, the elephants will get agitated and may attack the motorists,” she said on Monday.

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 wide range – changing one’s life on the 600-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage (“To Be a Pilgrim”), throwing 90,000 pounds of tomatoes at Buñol, in Europe’s biggest food fight (“Tomato Fight!”); sneaking past Vatican guards to view Michelangelo’s Pietà (“Sneaking Into St. Peter’s”); meeting the forebears at their luxury hotel in Sicily (“The Old Country”). Some are thoughtful (“Off the Map”), some ridiculous (“The Curse of the Tassled Loafers” and “Hostage of the Hostile Hostel”) and some sublime (“What I Learned About Coleoptera By Having a Few Climb Up My Shorts”).

Free Book Offer: If you can’t make up your mind between the Italy and Spain book, just buy them both.
E-mail your receipt from Amazon.com, Bn.com, or Powells.com and we will send you a book of your choice (Italy, Spain, or Europe) for free. Deadline is Jan. 15, 2007. EuropeBackpack@aol.com

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 were engaged in casual sex for money. Another 2,000-3,000 girls and boys were involved in full-time prostitution, said the study – carried out jointly with the Kenyan government.

Poverty is the reason, UNICEF says: many families see the sex industry as the only way of putting food on the table. European men represented half of all their clients, the report said. Italian, German and Swiss nationals are the most common clients of child sex workers among tourists – at 18%, 14% and 12% respectively. Kenyan men are the largest single group of clients, comprising 38% of the total.

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 to be built under the deal with China.

This is the latest of significant ventures invested by China in Africa – it is said that China now imports more oil from Angola than from Saudi. Some commentators raise the question of China colonising Africa, rich with resources and governed by corrupt leaders.

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, including giving relief from sore throats and colds. Mr Garcia suggested the legal use of coca as a way of fighting cocaine production and trafficking.

Peru is the world’s second largest producer of cocaine behind Colombia. Mr Garcia’s comments came at a press conference for foreign correspondents at the government palace in Lima. Whilst some of Mr Garcia’s ideas sounded unorthodox, he insisted that the coca plant could be used for nutritional and medicinal purposes. The president likened coca leaves to the herb rosemary and to rocket, adding that he personally had cooked with coca leaves. “You can put coca leaves in your roast dinners, in the oven, you can make many things which it will give a special taste to,” he said and that the best way to fight illegal coca plantations was to open new markets so that Peru’s land could be used to produce coca for legal purposes.

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 the end of the year, and if you recommend this to others, we are giving lots of prizes,” the Ministry of Gender Equality said in an Internet posting. The ministry is offering to pay companies whose employees pledge not to buy sex after what are typically alcohol-soaked, year-end parties.

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 legal marriage age of 16. Domestic violence remains widespread. Womankind Worldwide says the Afghan authorities rarely investigate women’s complaints of violent attacks. Women reporting rape run the risk of being imprisoned for having sexual intercourse outside marriage. Although women now hold more than 25% of the seats in the Afghan parliament, female politicians and activists often face intimidation or even violence.

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 he was too big for a single seat. Air France’s lawyer said that the company had a clear policy of asking obese passengers to pay for two seats. “Let’s be objective. This man is fat,” lawyer Fernand Gamault told the court in Bobigny, according to Le Parisien newspaper. “He barely fits on the courtroom chair. How could he sit in an airplane?” Jauffret said he weighed more than 160 kilos (353 lb) and said he had flown numerous times, including on other Air France flights, without ever being asked to pay more. Air France’s web site urges overweight passengers to reserve a second seat, adding that failure to do so might mean they are refused access to an aircraft if it is fully booked.

A woman travelling to Mexico accidentally put her one month old grandson in an X-ray machine at Los Angeles International Airport. The woman, who spoke little English put the child in a plastic bin used to hold loose carry-on items for security scanning. Security screeners saw the baby as it started to pass through, pulled it out and immediately sought medical assistance for the child which was examined at a local hospital and judged not to have received a dangerous dose of radiation.

A 27 year old New Zealand woman is in critical condition in hospital after being crushed by a dolphin that leaped on to her boat. The woman had been watching the dolphins off the North Island’s Coromandel Peninsula from the bow of the small boat when a bottlenose dolphin landed on her. She suffered serious head injuries and was flown to hospital in Auckland. Bottlenose dolphins, which can measure up to 2.5 metres (8.2 feet) in length and weigh as much as 260 kg (572 pounds), are known for their friendly behaviour toward human beings and seldom become aggressive.

Things don’t look like they are going to improve in Zimbabwe; mad despot President Robert Mugabe who has been president since 1980, has warned he will resist protests against his proposal to postpone presidential elections until 2010. The ruling Zanu-PF party backed a move to extend Mr Mugabe’s reign from 2008 to 2010, but opposition parties have vowed to resist the plan. Critics say he has ruined what was one of Africa’s most developed economies. Zimbabwe shamefully has the world’s lowest life expectancy, highest inflation rate and chronic unemployment. Mr Mugabe says he is the victim of a Western plot to bring him down because of opposition to his seizure of White-owned land.

A huge stone pagoda being built on the outskirts of India’s financial capital, Mumbai (Bombay) was recently opened to the public after Buddha’s ashes and bones were enshrined in it. Work on the pagoda began in 1997 and it will take at least another three years to complete.

The Mumbai pagoda may be one of the largest Buddhist structures and will be used as a centre to promote meditation (or Vipassana) as taught by Buddha, but no particular religion.

The British handed the relics over to a Buddhist society in 1920 which were kept in a monastery until 1997, when they were placed in a shrine in a shallow pit on top of the dome. Women are not allowed to visit the place where the relics are kept. This year is special for Buddha’s followers as it is 2,550 years since he attained enlightenment.

Thanks to the likes of Madonna and Angelina Jolie, adoptions of children from overseas seems to have developed a high profile in recent months. According to the US State Department, China is the most popular source of US overseas adoptions; since 2000, 6,493 visas issued for Chinese orphans in fiscal 2006, Guatemala is the second most popular country in 2006, with 4,135 visas and Russia third, with 3,706 adoptions. China has recently announced some new rules, to take effect as of May 1st 2007 that could effectively rule out up to 25% of prospective parents. The nation that for years legislated for one child only has stated that prospective parents who are unmarried, over 50 or obese will not be able to adopt children from China. Those who qualify under the new rules are parents aged between 30 and 50 years, who are married and have had no more than two divorces between them, said US adoption agencies. Gay couples, people taking medication for anxiety and depression, and those with a body mass index (BMI) – the measure of a person’s weight relative to height – of more than 40 will be excluded.

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A recent report published by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) examines the impact that no-frills airlines have had on the airline market, on passengers and on society more widely. The report called “’No-frills carriers: Revolution or Evolution?’ shows that no-frills airlines have revolutionised the short-haul airline market, radically changing the fares on offer, and the choice of airlines, airports and destinations available to passengers. Other airlines now run their businesses differently as a result of the advent of no-frills airlines,” stated CAA. “However, contrary to common perceptions, no-frills airlines appear to have had little impact on overall rates of traffic growth, and there is little evidence of any marked change to the income and socio-economic profile of air passengers.” Most of the no-frills airlines’ growth seems to have been at the expense of other carriers. Although the number of leisure passengers from all income groups has increased, the majority of this increase has come from those in middle and higher income and socio-economic groups.

MSN.co.uk has re-launched its travel channel which has teamed with major travel brands including Expedia and Conde Nast Traveller, comprises “exclusive content, bespoke information and a holiday booking service provided by Expedia”. There are travel guides from Rough Guides and Dorling Kindersley in addition to independent travel opinions by Tripadvisor. Guardian Travel will provide travel features and its archive will also be available. The channel is aimed at 25- to 44-year-old frequent flyers, who travel regularly and book their holidays online.