Wishing wells contain money mountain

LONDON, Nov 30: Ever wondered how much money the world's wishing wells contain?

One in five UK adults regularly throws a copper or two into wishing wells and fountains, a study shows, spending an average of 31 pence at tourist sites such as Rome's Trevi Fountain.

That means those making a wish with their spare change literally throw away just under 3 million pounds every year, according to the ''Fountain Money Mountain'' report.

Financial services marketing agency Teamspirit, which commissioned the study, called for the funds to go to good causes.

''Some wishing wells and fountains are already used by charities as a means of securing funds,'' said managing director Joanne Parker.

''But it would be great if the profits from every single one of them were used for good causes.

''For me personally, and for many others I'm sure, to combine the thrill of making a secret wish with the knowledge that your money is going to help others would be very rewarding.''

Megan Pacey, director of policy and campaigns at the Institute of Fundraising, added: ''When money is quite literally 'thrown away' into wishing wells and fountains, it would be to everyone's benefit if those responsible for the upkeep of such sites could nominate an appropriate UK charity to receive these funds.''(AGENCIES)

New Zealand and Australian troops to leave Tonga

WELLINGTON, Nov 30: New Zealand and Australia will withdraw their troops from Tonga this week following a return to calm after violent pro-democracy riots in the island kingdom, officials said today.

Foreign police will however remain in the capital Nuku'alofa, mainly to help investigation into the riots that erupted on November 16, killing six people and destroying 80 percent of businesses.

''Should any further disturbance arise, and this is not anticipated, Tongan authorities are confident that they can handle the situation,'' New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff said in a statement after talks with Australian and Tongan authorities.

New Zealand and Australia sent about 150 troops and police to help maintain order after the riots, sparked when parliament went into recess without voting on democratic reforms.

Last Thursday Tonga's King George Tupou V assured his people he was committed to political reforms.

Tonga is a group of 170 coral and volcanic islands about 2,000 km north of New Zealand, with a population of about 100,000 people. A semi-feudal kingdom, the king appoints most of the parliamentary representatives and controls the key assets.

Australian Defence Minister Brendan Nelson said about 50 Australian defence personnel sent to Tonga would return as local security forces were now in control.

Goff said New Zealand troops had been working in a low key manner, providing support to Tongan police and military.

Police from the two countries would stay on in Tonga to assist in investigations and forensic work in the aftermath of the riots, he said.

(AGENCIES)

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I am leaving UN with sense of dismay and optimism: Annan

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 30: United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is retiring from office after two five-years terms on Dec 31, says he is leaving the world body with a mixed feeling of dismay and optimism.

In an opinion piece in British newspaper Sun, he expresses hope for positive changes in a world that faces myriad daunting challenges ranging from povetry to global warming and terrorism.

Conceding that the world is not on track to meet all the Millennium Development Goal (MDGs) aimed at eliminating or drastically reducing several social and economic ills by 2015, Annan, however, feels encouraged by new initiatives to deal with debt relief, HIV/AIDS and undemocratic regimes.

"We risk a cascade of new countries and perhaps terrorists acquiring nuclear or biological weapons. Even without this, terrorism continues to sow fear and suspicion between religions and races, he says adding,"everyday reports reach us of new laws broken and new heinous crimes inflicted on individuals and minority groups."

Calling for a united international response, he says people need to be bound together by something more than just a global market.

"The strong, as well as the weak, need to agree to be bound by the same rules. Nations need to come together, not at cross purposes but with a common purpose, to shape our common destiny," he emphasises.

Looking back on his own efforts to move the world in this direction by working with the UNFs Member States, he writes, "We have pushed some big rocks to the top of the mountain, even if others have slipped from our grasp and rolled back."

"Working at the helm of the UN was at times difficult and challenging but also thrillingly rewarding," he says. (PTI)

Climate change killed Australia pre-historic animals

CANBERRA, Nov 30: Giant kangaroos and wombats bigger than cars which once roamed Australia were killed by climate change and not human hunters, Australian scientists said today.

The report comes as the country struggles with what could be its worst drought in 1,000 years, affecting more than half its farmlands.

Known as megafauna, the huge animals were driven into extinction by a steady warming of Australia's climate, which in turn saw a once-lush outback region turn to red desert and grasslands.

''For about the last half-million years it's been consistently getting drier in Australia,'' Dr Gregory Webb told Reuters after studying fossil-rich areas of south-east Queensland state.

''The apparent progressive megafaunal extinction on the Darling Downs does not support the sudden blitzkrieg model resulting from human hunting,'' Webb's report said.

The megafauna -- kangaroos 2.5 metres tall, wombats as big as cars and cattle, giant Ostrich-like Emus and lizards -- were common in vast areas of Australia 40,000 years ago before gradually disappearing.

Most theories on their vanishing centre on the arrival in Australia around the same time of Aboriginal people, who were believed to have hunted the animals out of existance.

But Mr Webb, from Queensland University of Technology, said a study done with colleague Dr Gilbert Price had found many animals were probably drought-stressed when they died.

If humans had been responsible, he said, the fossil evidence would show the vulnerable and easily-hunted animals dying out around the same period rather than over thousands of years.

''Whole habitats changed, from forests which required a lot of rainfall to grasslands, and now it has become much more open and scrubbier,'' Mr Webb said.

''Of course the organisms that required more enclosed lush, green habitat simply had nowhere to live.''

Scientists have said that Australia must brace itself for long-term climate change and water shortages due to the accelerating pace of global warming.

(AGENCIES)

Birthday cake but no Putin for France's Chirac

RIGA, Nov 30: French President Jacques Chirac got a birthday cake from his Latvian host but no surprise visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin to mark his 74th birthday.

President Vaira Vike-Freiberga had a Latvian soldier present the veteran French leader with a white-iced cake covered with red roses -- the colours of the Latvian flag -- when he arrived at what will almost certainly be his last NATO summit.

Mr Chirac kissed the president's hand as other leaders applauded, but he did not taste the cake.

Mr Putin caused a diplomatic frenzy on Tuesday by offering to drop in on the former Soviet republic after the summit to congratulate Chirac, a political ally, on his birthday yesterday.

President Putin was not invited to the summit and the move was seen by some diplomats as a bid to upstage the US-led defence alliance and cause mischief in the Baltic states, which no Russian leader has visited since they won independence from Moscow in 1991.

Mr Chirac said at a news conference he had been ''neither the instigator nor the organiser'' of the idea, and he would be receiving a telephone call from Putin instead.

Vike-Freiberga said she had given Chirac the cake as a consolation for having to spend his birthday at a NATO summit.

''I was quite ready to serve a dinner for him as well, along with any friends he might care to bring along,'' she said in a dig at President Putin, a former KGB agent.

But it was not to be. The Kremlin announced late on Tuesday that scheduling difficulties had made the trip impossible.

The episode highlighted tensions between NATO's new central and east European members and their former Cold War master.

''We should rembember where we are,'' Polish Defence Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said. ''From this city, people were once taken away in cattle wagons to Siberia. The KGB was murdering people and today we are here as a club of the most powerful democracies.''

Mr Chirac is expected to stand down next year after 12 years in office, although he has not officially ruled out running for an unprecedented third term.

Vike-Freiberga said French President Chirac had given her a birthday present too since she turns 69 on Friday -- a book by a courtier of 16th century French king Francois I. (AGENCIES)

Egypt minister emerges unscathed from headscarf row

CAIRO, Nov 30: A flamboyant Egyptian minister who sparked a political furore when he described the Muslim headscarf as a ''step backward'' appears to have emerged largely unscathed from a row that many had predicted would unseat him.

Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, an abstract painter known for his liberal views and a member of Egypt's ruling party, ended two weeks of self-imposed seclusion from public events on Tuesday to launch Cairo's annual film festival.

The audience of celebrities, intellectuals and show business executives greeted him with loud applause, as if to congratulate him on surviving the conservative Islamist campaign against him.

Hosni neither offered his resignation, as demanded by Islamists, nor apologised for saying Egypt would not progress so long as its people depended on religious edicts ''worth 5 cents''.

''The bottom line is that to hand in a resignation or make an official apology could only be forced by the presidency,'' said Egyptian publisher and activist Hisham Kassem.

''There will be no internal repercussions because basically the presidency has decided not to take any action against him. Parliament can stand on its head but they are not going to be able to do anything.''

The row Hosni sparked underlines deep tension between Islam and secularism in Egypt, which has seen a rise in religious conservatism in recent decades and where most Muslim women now wear headscarves in public.

''Women with their beautiful hair are like flowers that should not be covered and blocked from people,'' Hosni told an independent newspaper earlier this month. He later said the remarks were his personal views and not meant for publication.

Most Muslim clerics say wearing headscarves is obligatory for women but some Muslims dispute that view.

COMPETITION ON ISLAM

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's biggest opposition group, had demanded Hosni resign over his remarks, saying they were insulting to Egypt's top two Sunni Muslim clerics, the head of al-Azhar mosque and the mufti.

Later, members of Hosni's National Democratic Party joined the fray, which degenerated into name-calling in parliament.

Zakaria Azmi, President Hosni Mubarak's chief of staff, said Hosni should not have talked about religious matters.

Analysts said some NDP lawmakers may have taken a strategic decision to attack Hosni, worried they may lose ground to the Brotherhood.

''Some of them did it for tactical reasons, to show that the Muslim Brotherhood is not the only protector of Islam. So it was kind of a competition of who is more Islamic,'' said Abdel Monem Said of Egypt's Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

But analysts said Mubarak would have been reluctant to drop Hosni because it would mean taking sides with his biggest political opponents, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood is officially banned, but members elected as independents hold 88 seats in the 454-member parliament.

Hosni did promise to set up a cultural-religious committee to oversee ministry publications. Members of parliament will have a chance to question Hosni about his remarks on December 3. (AGENCIES)

Plutonium in warheads last longer than expected

WASHINGTON, Nov 30: The plutonium in nuclear warheads seems to be much sturdier than previously thought, with a reliable life span of as much as 100 years.

Scientists who studied all of the warheads in the government's nuclear arsenal reported that plutonium pits, the core of the weapon, can be counted on to work as expected for twice as long as once believed.

The classified report's conclusions were released yesterday by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the semiautonomous agency within the Energy Department that oversees the nuclear weapons program.

"These studies show that the degradation of plutonium in our nuclear weapons will not affect warhead reliability for decades," said Linton Brooks, head of the NNSA.

But he added the plutonium, in the form of softball-size "pits" that serve as a trigger for nuclear detonation, is not the only thing that might go wrong as a warhead ages. Therefore, plans to design sturdier, long-lasting warheads will proceed as planned.

"Although plutonium aging contributes, other factors control the overall life expectancy of nuclear weapons systems," said Brooks.

The new findings show, on a practical basis, that we don't need expensive, provocative new nuclear weapons designs and industrial-scale bomb production. These proposals make the US appear hypocritical when preaching to other nations that they can't have weapons of mass destruction," said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, a group that monitors activities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. (AGENCIES)

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Treatment timeouts dangerous in HIV care

BOSTON, Nov 30: Doctors seeking to reduce the dangerous side effects of long-term HIV therapy have discovered that taking a breather is not better.

People infected with the HIV virus and who have treatment timeouts are more than twice as likely to die or suffer other serious consequences than those kept on a steady diet of drugs, a study published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine shows.

The study was supposed to follow patients for six years, but it was called off after about 16 months because the dangers of intermittent treatment are so high.

And while doctors expected the risk of heart, liver and kidney disease to decline with intermittent drug use, primarily because those were regarded as side effects of the newest HIV medicines, the likelihood of those problems actually increased.

''Treatment may increase the risk, but the absence of treatment appears to increase the risk even more,'' James Neaton of the University of Minnesota told Reuters.

Under the rules of the study, 2,720 volunteers from 33 countries were given holidays of various lengths from their drug therapy once their CD4+ counts, a measure of the health of the immune system, hit 350. Drug treatment resumed if their counts dropped below 250.

But those patients were 2-1/2 times more likely to die or be hit by an AIDS-related infection than the 2,752 volunteers who were told to keep taking their medicine, regardless of their CD4+ count.

Also, the people who received intermittent drug treatment were 70 percent more likely to develop heart, kidney or liver problems.

''This was a big surprise,'' Neaton said.

Fifty-five of those who had intermittent treatment died from various causes, while 30 who had continual treatment died, the study said.

AGGRESSIVE THERAPIES

Doctors had thought that kidney, liver and heart disease were caused by the aggressive therapies that have allowed HIV patients to live longer.

Among patients who received the drugs only when they seemed to be needed, ''we expected the rate of cardiovascular disease to be 15 percent lower,'' the researchers said.

The new findings suggest that those health problems may instead be the result of long-term infection with the HIV virus, Neaton said.

Doctors involved in the Strategies for Management of Anti-Retroviral Therapies (SMART) study had hoped that patients could take a break from the treatments because the therapy is difficult and expensive.

''The prospect of lifelong treatment is difficult for people with HIV,'' said David Cooper of the University of New South Wales in Australia. ''We are gratified that the SMART study has so clearly delineated the risk and benefits of these two strategies.''

At a conference on AIDS, Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the U S ational Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he did not believe any doctor should now offer patients treatment breaks, at least not breaks monitored by watching their CD4 immune cells.

''I think for practical purposes, it is the end,'' Fauci told reporters. He said doctors might still try the treatment holiday approach if they monitor viral load -- how much virus is circulating in the patient's blood.

(AGENCIES)

Cancer survivors urged to maintain healthy weight

WASHINGTON, Nov 30: Staying slim and fit is especially important for cancer survivors, because obesity raises the risk of cancer coming back, the American Cancer Society said in its guidelines.

''The evidence really is quite strong for the need for cancer survivors to achieve and maintain a healthful weight,'' Wendy Demark-Wahnefried of Duke University Medical Center, one of the report's authors, said in an interview.

The recommendations, updating advice issued in 2001 and 2003, were published in the society's ''CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.''

The report, issued yesterday, said obesity is a well-established risk factor for some of the most common forms of cancer, including breast cancer in post-menopausal women and cancers of the colon, esophagus, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, kidney, uterus and prostate.

It also cited increasing evidence that being overweight raises the risk for recurrence and reduces likelihood of survival for many cancers.

Demark-Wahnefried said cancer survivors also face a greater risk of heart disease and diabetes, adding, ''Obesity is a big risk factor for those diseases as well as second cancers.''

The American Cancer Society said nearly two-thirds of US cancer patients live more than five years after diagnosis, and more than 10 million Americans now alive have been diagnosed with cancer at some time in their lives.

The report said vegetarian diets can have many benefits because they tend to be low in saturated fat and high in fiber and vitamins.

''However, no direct evidence has determined whether consuming a vegetarian diet has any additional benefit for the prevention of cancer recurrence over an omnivorous diet high in vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, and low in red meats,'' the report stated.

The report noted that preliminary evidence indicates that for some types of cancer, one to three hours per week of exercise can cut the risk of cancer recurrence and death. (AGENCIES)

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