MOSCOW: Russian lawmakers today resumed impeachment hearings against President Boris Yeltsin as the Kremlin warned that any move to remove the President will be a declaration of war and plunge Russia into crisis.

Kremlin officials made the stark warnings as the lower chamber of parliament, the Duma, began a second day of hearings on five charges. Opposition leaders predict at least one of the charges will be passed.

``Impeaching Yeltsin will seriously aggravate the political situation'' and be a declaration of war, a senior Kremlin official was quoted as saying by the Itar-Tass news agency.

11-year-old up for manslaughter rap

SYDNEY: An 11-year-old boy will become the youngest person in aUSTRALIA TO be tried for manslaughter, the New South Wales Supreme Court ruled on Friday. The boy, who was 10 at the time, is accused of killing six-year-old Corey Davis, who drowned in the Georges River at Macquarie Fields in Sydney in March last year. Last month,a magistrate decided the boy, who was accused of dropping Corey into the river and leaving him to drown, should not be put on trial because there was no reasonable prospect a jury would convict him.

War on e-mail

WASHINGTON: The huge volume of e-mail from China, protesting the NATO bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade, has shut down the White House website.``The website has been overwhelmed by a number of e-mails sent from China,'' said a White House spokesman. The website for the US embassy in Beijing was was also defaced by hackers, an US consulate official in Shanghai said.

The China Daily said, the hackers inserted the slogan ``Down with the barbarians'' into the embassy's main page and replaced an image of ambassador James Sasser with the same slogan in Chinese characters.