The move may threaten the delivery of emergency food aid.”They cancelled May Day celebrations, stopped flights and anyone coming in is put into quarantine for 10 days,” a Westerner living in Pyongyang said yesterday.”They are taking it very seriously Anyone from an affected area is being quarantined,” he said. The foreigners, who include two diplomats, are being kept together in a hotel near the capital.The country’s only scheduled air link with the outside world, the twice weekly Air Koryo flight to Beijing, has been cancelled since Saturday, although a weekly flight from Vladivostok, Russia, may still be running. The regular ferry service with Japan has been suspended.But KCNA, the North Korean news agency, denies that there are any suspected Sars cases in the country, a claim also made by The Korea Times, a South Korean newspaper. The KCNA said: “Lurking behind the false report [of cases] is a sinister intention to tarnish the image of the DPRK, which has the best healthcare system for people.”The emergency measures taken at airports, rail and sea ports are bound to interrupt the drip feed of foreign aid, which keeps the fragile economy, and many people, alive.Five UN officials responsible for supervising deliveries of food and other aid, upon which at least a third of population relies, are among those in quarantine. Gerald Bourke, a spokesman for the World Food Programme in Beijing, said: “Shipments [to North Korea] are not affected but for the moment we have fewer people on the ground.

Of course, if there were to be an outbreak, given the weak condition of the people it would be very serious. They don’t have the medical infrastructure to cope with an outbreak.”The cruise ship that carries tourists from South Korea to the resort of Mount Kumgang in North Korea, which brings in a steady flow of foreign currency, has stopped running, and more than 10,000 people have had to cancel their visits.South Korean officials participating in ministerial-level talks last week in Pyongyang could not get off the aircraft until they provided health certificates and had their temperatures taken. Once in Pyongyang, they were not permitted to leave their hotel.Meanwhile, China, the country worst affected by Sars, said yesterday that five more people had died of the disease and a further 146 were infected, taking the death toll there to 224 and the number of cases to 4,698. The World Health Organisation also placed Taipei on its list of places to avoid. The UN agency said travellers should “consider postponing all but essential travel” to the Taiwanese capital, as well as to China’s northern city of Tianjin and the northern province of Inner Mongolia. Beijing, Hong Kong and the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Shanxi are already on the list.Four WHO health experts travelled to China’s Hebei province, where the number of suspected infections has risen sharply, to assess whether the healthcare system could cope with the outbreak. The province surrounds Beijing, home to hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Hebei.In rural China, some villages have set up roadblocks to try to stop people travelling to the capital.The International Monetary Fund played down the impact of Sars on Asian and global economies yesterday.

Tom Dawson, the external relations director, said: “If the disease is contained soon, the macroeconomic impact in Asia should be manageable given the robustness of the economies.” The global impact was also likely to be limited, he said.. After three troubled years as a German, Miss Piggy, the grande dame of puppetry who never lost her original accent, has won back her US passport. He added: “Our commitment as the Jim Henson Company’s new owners and as Jim Henson’s children is to preserve and enhance those assets, fully realise that potential, and thereby honour our father’s legacy.”EM.TV bought the ailing Jim Henson Company for $680m three years ago, but struggled to cope financially after it decided to expand beyond children’s films and picked up the rights to Formula One racing. It also became embroiled in a scandal in which its founder and his brother were fined last month for misleading shareholders.Mr Henson’s five children have bought the company back for $89m, which includes the rights to The Muppet Babies and The Fraggles as well as other successful puppetry creations. However, the deal does not include the Sesame Street characters Elmo and Big Bird, because EM.TV sold them in 2000.Jim Henson, who died in 1990, first worked in television in 1954, but his most successful creation, The Muppet Show, was not broadcast until 1976. It reached nearly 250 million viewers every week in more than 100 countries and won three Emmys during its five-year run. Because of its popularity, major celebrities agreed to appear on the show where they would swap banter with the puppets and be abused by the two ageing critics, Statler and Waldorf.Such was the long-lasting appeal of Kermit the Frog – created originally from an old coat and a couple of ping-pong balls – that he featured in the Queen’s golden jubilee celebrations and was given a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.