TOKYO — A man suspected of killing seven people in a knifing rampage foretold the mayhem in a series of messages posted on the Internet, including one just before the attack saying, "It's time," police and media reports said today.

Tomohiro Kato, the 25-year-old man accused of ramming pedestrians with a truck and then stabbing 17 bystanders in Tokyo's popular Akihabara district on Sunday, posted the messages on an Internet bulletin board from his cell phone, a police spokesman said. He is in custody.

The police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing protocol, refused to release the Internet messages, but news reports said they were posted in a message board thread titled, "I will kill people in Akihabara," hours before the stabbings.

KABUL, Afghanistan — First lady Laura Bush highlighting signs of rebirth in war-weary Afghanistan on Sunday ahead of a donors conference in Paris, where the U.S. hopes billions of dollars in international aid will be pledged to help the embattled nation.This is Laura Bush's third trip to Afghanistan, where the repressive Taliban ruled until U.S. forces invaded following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."The people of Afghanistan don't want to go back and live like that," Bush told reporters on her plane as it made the nearly 14-hour flight to the Afghan capital. "They know what it was like. The international community can't drop Afghanistan now, at this very crucial time."Bush also is visiting Bamiyan Province, where two colossal statues of Buddha that were carved into sandstone cliffs more than 2,000 years ago were demolished by the Taliban in March 2001. Destruction of the historical and cultural treasures prompted an outcry from the international community.

QINGLIAN, China — An additional 120 troops were sent today to help soldiers with explosives and anti-tank weapons blast rocks and mud slowing the drainage of a still-rising lake that threatened to flood more than 1 million people downstream.By this morning, the water level in the earthquake-formed Tangjiashan lake had reached more than six feet above a spillway carved into the dam last week to divert water and release pressure on the unstable dam wall, the official Xinhua News Agency said.A magnitude 5.0 aftershock Sunday sent landslides down surrounding mountains and underscored the threat of flooding. Another aftershock of the same magnitude struck this afternoon, shaking the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu and the hard-hit city of Mianyang for about 10 seconds.The death toll from the quake climbed Sunday to 69,136, with 17,686 people still missing.