Aussie hurt in Thai bomb blast

An Australian photographer and three policemen were wounded when a bomb believed set by Muslim insurgents exploded in southern Thailand, officials said.

The home-made bomb, hidden on a roadside, went off when a police team was inspecting the body of a Buddhist man shot dead and set on fire in Yala province, said police Lieutenant Colonel Saratwuth Wongderm.

The officer said he believed the insurgents had set a trap for police, who rushed to the scene after a caller informed them that a person had been slain.

Australian photographer Philip Blenkinsop, who was on assignment for Time magazine, was among the wounded.

"I was about four metres away from the body where the bomb was hidden. I am very lucky that the bomb didn't have too many sharp nails in it. I pity the man who was shot in the head and burned," Blenkinsop said at a hospital where he was being treated for minor wounds to the face and eye.

Blenkinsop, based in Bangkok since the mid-1980s, is an award-winning photographer who has covered a number of conflicts, including the guerrilla war in Indonesia's Aceh province, the communist insurgency in Nepal and the plight of the ethnic Hmong in communist Laos.

He began his career with The Australian newspaper in Sydney, but left Australia to work in Southeast Asia.

Thailand's southernmost provinces have been racked by a Muslim insurgency which has killed more than 2,200 people since early 2004. The secretive rebels are believed to be fighting for an independent Islamic homeland.

Australia may join missile defence study

Japan and the US plan to expand a joint study on missile defence by adding Australia amid concerns about North Korea's weapons program, a news report said.

Japan and the United States have been stepping up efforts to build a joint missile defence system following North Korea's nuclear test in October.

Australia would join the two countries to share information on missile defence and discuss how to respond to various situations, Japan's business daily Nikkei reported, citing unnamed officials at Japan's Defence Ministry.

Defence Ministry officials could not immediately confirm the report.

The three countries reached an agreement on the three-party joint study during a meeting of defence and foreign affairs senior officials held in Tokyo last month, the paper said.

The possible scenarios that the three countries will study are attacks by North Korea's medium range missiles as well as Chinese ballistic missiles reaching the US territory of Guam or Australia, Nikkei said.

Australia has not decided to introduce missile defence but is expected to explore the possibility of having such a system, according to the report.

Landslides in southwest China kill seven

Landslides caused by heavy rains in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan have killed seven people and four others are missing, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Torrential rains along with hail on Sunday evening triggered landslides in several rural counties in the southwestern part of the province, Xinhua said.

Mud and rocks covered roads, destroyed houses and forced about 300 residents to evacuate, the agency said.

After suffering an extended drought, Sichuan has been hit by several severe storms during the last two months.

Stop whale-kill program, NZ tells Japan

Japan should drop plans to kill 50 humpback whales later this year as a gesture of goodwill after New Zealand helped a crippled Japanese whaling ship in Antarctica, the NZ environment minister said.

Conservation Minister Chris Carter said Japan's move to kill 50 humpback whales - an endangered species - as part of its scientific whaling program was a "provocative act" and would generate "enormous hostility" worldwide.

He said he approached Japan's ambassador to New Zealand to ask that Japan drop the humpback hunt in return for the assistance New Zealand gave Japan after its whaling vessel Nisshin Maru was disabled by a fire off the northern Antarctic coast in February.

Wellington provided weather information and communications support to the Japanese whaling fleet, and a sick whaler was brought to New Zealand for hospital treatment.

"We are trying to persuade the Japanese to drop the humpbacks as a gesture of goodwill," Carter told National Radio, though conceding there was no way to halt the hunt.

Carter, meanwhile, said anti-whaling countries were expected to regain a majority at the International Whaling Commission's (IWC) annual meeting in Alaska next week.

"Last year for the first time we lost a simple majority, but the conservation bloc has been very active in recruiting new members," Carter said.

Greece, Croatia, Peru and Israel were among the new recruits, while Panama, Nicaragua and Cost Rica had switched sides to oppose whaling "mainly because they see eco-tourism now as their future," he said.

Japan kills some 1,000 whales each year under an IWC-allowed scientific program, and the meat is sold as food. Many environmental groups object, but Japan claims the program is needed to gauge whale populations and study their breeding and feeding habits.

Japan had planned to kill 945 whales from the Southern Ocean and the northern Pacific this year before whaling was suspended after the Nisshin Maru was crippled by fire and one crew member killed.

Japan said in March it would hunt minke, fin and humpback whales when its program resumed later this year.