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Typhoon Haiyan, which killed thousands in the Philippines, has made landfall in northern Vietnam, close to the China border, as a weaker Category One storm. It still carried sustained winds of up to 140 km/h (85mph) as it arrived close to the Ha Long Bay tourist destination. Some 600,000 people have been evacuated from at-risk regions in Vietnam. Nick Childs reports.

Tropical Storm Haiyan, which killed thousands as a typhoon in the Philippines, has made landfall in north Vietnam, near the China border. It still carried gusts of up to 157km/h (98 mph) as it arrived close to the Ha Long Bay tourist destination. Some 600,000 people have been evacuated from at-risk regions in Vietnam and at least six people have been killed. China issued a typhoon alert for Hainan island, Guangdong and Guangxi after Haiyan's path changed. The typhoon has decreased markedly in strength from the Category Five storm that swept through the Philippines in a day, causing mass destruction. It is now classified as a severe tropical storm. By 21:00 GMT on Monday, as it heads into China, it will have become a tropical depression. Rainfall will be the main hazard. A 48-hour accumulation of 100mm to 200mm is expected, with up to 400mm over high ground. The typhoon has already brought heavy rain to China's Hainan island Widespread flooding is a possibility, includi...

In movies and TV dramas, sodium thiopental is shown as a sinister truth serum used to get information out of captured people. Michael Mosley tried it out. One of the great challenges of living in our society is knowing when people are telling the truth or not. We lie all the time and are remarkably bad at detecting when other people are deliberately deceiving us. There are lots of urban myths about lie detecting, such as the claim that liars tend to look away, twitch their feet or touch their noses when lying (the so-called Pinocchio effect). In study after study, it has been shown that professionals such as policemen are no more reliable at detecting liars than the rest of us. So it's not surprising that for many years scientists have been working to develop "truth drugs" - drugs that will make you open up and tell all you know to an interrogator. One of the oldest and best known of these truth drugs is sodium thiopental. Although it was first developed in the 1930s,...

When a scene from Apocalypse Now was shot on an obscure beach in the Philippines in the late 70s, little did the film-makers know they were giving birth to the country's surfing culture. "Charlie don't surf," says the reckless and irrepressible Colonel Kilgore, in one of the most memorable lines of the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now. Charlie is the American soldiers' derogatory nickname for their enemy, the Viet Cong, and the surf-mad colonel is trying to persuade his troops to ride the waves, despite the bombs falling all around them. Apocalypse Now, released in 1979, depicts the madness and mayhem of conflict, and is widely regarded as one of the most powerful war films ever made. But it also has another legacy - something that the director, Francis Ford Coppola, could not possibly have intended. Apocalypse Now was not actually filmed in Vietnam, but in the little fishing town of Baler in the northern Philippines. As the cameras rolled, local Filipinos li...