A 27-YEAR-OLDman has died of bird flu, becoming the second person this year to be killed by the disease in Thailand, a health ministry official said yesterday. The man came from Uthai Thani province in the country's north.

At least 134 people have died worldwide since the disease began spreading in Asia in late 2003, according to the World Health Organisation, including 15 in Thailand.

In the past two weeks, Thailand has confirmed two outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry and recorded its first human fatalities from the disease in eight months.

Farc attacks ahead of inauguration

LEFTIST rebels were blamed for two attacks last Friday on the eve of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe's inauguration to a second four-year term . . . a car bomb that killed four officers and the driver outside a Cali police station, and an attack that killed two soldiers in the province of Tolima.

Authorities said the car bomb also injured four police officers in Cali, Colombia's third-largest city, as part of a series of attacks by leftist rebels in the run-up to tomorrow's inauguration.

Pompidou boo-boo as two artworks break

TWO fragile artworks on loan from the US slid from the walls of Paris's Pompidou centre and shattered, the museum said this weekend.

Part of an exhibit on Los Angeles art from 1955 to 1985, the lost artworks were a 1971 untitled resin piece by Peter Alexander and a 1967 Plexiglas creation by artist Craig Kauffman called 'Untitled Wall Relief '.

The Pompidou said it had carefully followed the loaners' instructions on how to display the pieces.

Alexander's piece, loaned by New York's Franklin Parrasch Gallery, fell from the wall the night before the opening, in early March. Kauffman's piece shattered in mid-July, just before the exhibit closed, the museum said. Both pieces were insured.

Policeman with junta links sentenced

A FORMER Argentinian police officer was sentenced on Friday to 25 years in prison for human rights abuses in connection with the 1978 disappearance of a Chilean man and his Argentine wife during Argentina's military dictatorship. A federal tribunal in Buenos Aires convicted the former officer, Julio Simon, although defence lawyers argued there was insufficient evidence to convict him, and vowed to appeal.