An eight-year-old boy in Fayoum province has contracted the bird flu virus after coming into contact with infected birds - the 47th case among humans in Egypt since 2006, the Health Ministry said yesterday.

The boy, Abdel Hamid el-Sayed Youssef, was taken to a local hospital with a high temperature, difficulty breathing and a pulmonary inflammation, spokesman Abdel Rahman Shahine said in a statement.

Altogether 20 people have died of bird flu in Egypt since it arrived in the country in February 2006.

Police shoot Sudanese on border

Egyptian police shot a Sudanese man in the back on the Israeli border yesterday when a group of migrants ignored their orders to stop and made a run for Israel, Egyptian security and medical sources said.

The man, named as 24-year-old Zakaria Moussa, had a bullet removed from his back in hospital in the Egyptian town of El Arish and is in a stable condition, they added.

The other four people in his group - a Sudanese married couple and two Eritreans - were caught and detained, the security sources added.

In two separate incidents on the same border but further south, Egyptian police caught 14 other African migrants trying to enter Israel yesterday, they said.

They were seven Eritrean women, three Ethiopian women, a Sudanese woman, two Ghanaian men and a man from Ivory Coast.

Serbian PM resigns

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica announced his resignation yesterday, saying his government was no longer functioning because of disunity in the coalition.

"This is the end of the government," he told a news conference.

Kostunica had conceded earlier in the week that the government was in "deep crisis". He indirectly accused his coalition partners of giving up on defending Serbia's claim to Kosovo in favour of better ties with the West, which backs Kosovo's secession.

Six killed in head-on collision

Six people have been killed in a head-on car collision in the Cotswolds in central England, British police said yesterday.

Five people - three men, a woman and a 15-year-old girl - were pronounced dead at the scene of the accident between Moreton-in-Marsh and Stow-on-the-Wold, while a woman died in hospital early yesterday.

Two children and one adult remain in a critical condition in hospital.

"Police are investigating the cause of the collision and remain keen to hear from anyone who witnessed it or noticed the vehicles shortly before it and has not yet spoken to them," said Gloucestershire Police in a statement.

Putin on Women's Day

German Chancellor Angela Merkel put President Vladimir Putin on the spot yesterday, asking if the former KGB spy had cooked breakfast for his wife Lyudmila to celebrate International Women's Day.

Putin smiled awkwardly before taking a deep breath: "I prepared her present and we will have breakfast together."

"Then breakfast means lunch?", Merkel quipped back at a meeting that took place after midday at the Novo-Ogaryovo presidential residence outside Moscow.

"Yes I suppose so. But it is Pancake holiday too... so we will have fun later today," Putin snapped back.