KUALA LUMPUR - FIVE men believed to be Vietnamese were killed in a shoot-out on Saturday in northern Malaysia after they staged an armed robbery, police said.
JAKARTA - INDONESIA has raised to maximum its alert on the Mount Semeru volcano in East Java, warning of potentially dangerous lava flows, an official at the country's vulcanology centre said on Saturday.
KUALA LUMPUR - RIOT police fired tear gas to disperse more than 2,000 Malaysians who tried to march to the national palace on Saturday to protest the use of English to teach math and science.
The demonstrators sought to submit a petition to the country's king to demand that the national Malay language be reinstated in schools for the two subjects - a sensitive issue for the ethnic Malay majority.
PATTANI (Thailand) - SUSPECTED separatist militants shot dead two Buddhists and set their bodies ablaze on Saturday in Thailand's Muslim-majority south, a police officer said.
The two men, brothers aged 40 and 36, were killed as they rode a motorcycle in Pattani province, one of the three southern provinces caught up in a separatist insurgency in which more than 3,000 people have been killed since 2003.
