US holding Iranian officials seized in Iraq-NYT

WASHINGTON, Dec 25: The US military is holding at least four Iranians in Iraq, including men the Bush administration calls senior military officials, who were seized in raids last week, The New York Times reported today.

The raids were aimed at people suspected of conducting attacks on Iraqi security forces, the Times said, citing senior Iraqi and US officials in Baghdad and Washington.

Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the US National Security Council, told the Times two Iranian diplomats were among those initially detained in the raids. They were turned over to Iraqi authorities and released, he said.

The Times said Johndroe confirmed that a group of other Iranians, including the military officials, remained in custody while an investigation continued.

It was unclear what kind of evidence American officials possessed that the Iranians were planning attacks, and the officials would not identify those being held, the Times said.

One official said that ''a lot of material'' was seized in the raid, but would not say if it included arms or documents that pointed to planning for attacks, the paper reported.

The two raids, in central Baghdad, have deeply upset Iraqi government officials, who have been making strenuous efforts to engage Iran on matters of security, the Times said. At least two of the Iranians were in Iraq on an invitation extended by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani during a visit to Tehran earlier this month.

The Times said it was particularly awkward for the Iraqis that one of the raids took place in the Baghdad compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite leaders, who traveled to Washington three weeks ago to meet President George W Bush.

Over the past four days, the Iraqis and Iranians have engaged in intense behind-the-scenes efforts to secure the release of the remaining detainees, the Times reported.

A senior Western official in Baghdad said the raids were conducted after US officials received information that the people detained had been involved in attacks on official security forces in Iraq, the paper reported.

US and Iraqi officials have long accused Iran of interfering in Iraq's internal affairs, but have rarely produced evidence. The Bush administration presented last week's arrests as a potential confirmation of the link, the Times said.

''We suspect this event validates our claims about Iranian meddling, but we want to finish our investigation of the detained Iranians before characterizing their activities,'' Johndroe told the Times.

(AGENCIES)

Japan hangs four, first executions in over a year

TOKYO, Dec 25: Japan hanged four convicts today in its first executions in more than a year, the Justice Ministry said.

As usual, the ministry did not identify those executed.

Media reports said the four executed were men, including two in their 70s, convicted of murder and theft. Under Japan's capital punishment system, inmates and their relatives are not told of an impending execution until the day it takes place, a practice that human rights groups say is inhumane.

Japan often carries out executions several times a year, usually when parliament is not in session or in December, when the country is winding down for the New Year holidays.

The previous execution took place on September 16, 2005, when one convict was hanged.

Capital punishment is little questioned by Japanese, who are shown by polls to support the death penalty in the face of a recent rise in violent crime.

(AGENCIES)

Royal doll is Christmas must-have in Spain

MADRID, Dec 25: A doll that looks like 14-month-old Princess Leonor has become Spain's must-have present this Christmas.

Shops have sold out of the limited edition dolls and they are being auctioned on the Internet for up to 500 euros (660 dollars) compared with their original price of 65.95.

Leonor, daughter of Crown Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia, will become queen if her parents do not have a male child.

The rubber and silicon doll is a dead ringer for Leonor but the Alicante-based company which makes the dolls swears the likeness is a coincidence.

Spain's Socialist government, known for equal male-female representation in its cabinet, has vowed to reform Spain's constitution to give equal succession rights to women and men.

Leonor's parents said last month they were expecting a second daughter in May.(AGENCIES)

China struggles to cap leaking gas well

BEIJING, Dec 25: Chinese authorities today struggled to cap a leaking gas well in the southwestern province of Sichuan that prompted 12,000 people to flee their homes, state media reported.

The leak began on Thursday at the Qingxi Number 1 Gas Well, operated by Sinopec Corp. <0386.HK>, in Sichuan's Xuanhan county, prompting emergency workeres to set fire to four sites around the well to burn off the gas.

But a first attempt to plug the leak was unsuccessful, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

''About 300 cubic metres of mud was infused into the well in the first capping, but no effect was achieved,'' Xinhua quoted He Shenghou, deputy chief of the emergency headquarters at the site, as saying.

There were still 20-30 metre (65-98 foot) flames around the well but tests concluded there were no toxic chemicals in the air and some residents were being allowed to return home, the report said.

Gas leaks are not uncommon in China.

In March, a leak at a well in the southwest forced the emergency evacuation of 15,000 and in July, toxic chlorine gas leaking from a rusting pipe in the northwestern region of Ningxia sent 164 people to hospital.

(AGENCIES)

China jails six coffin factory salt sellers

BEIJING, Dec 25: China has jailed six people for their roles in producing and distributing 500 tonnes of toxic salt in a coffin factory, Chinese media reported today, the latest in a series of food health scares to hit the country.

The six were part of a group in the southwestern city of Chongqing that made the salt from fishery or industrial materials, which included lead and barium but lacked essential iodine, the Beijing News said.

The salt had been sold to counties around Chongqing and also to the neighbouring provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou, it said.

It did not say if anyone had fallen ill from the salt.

Food security has become a priority for China after a series scandals over tainted or counterfeit products.

Chinese media last month reported that a northeastern food processor polished up and sold tonnes of rice, some of it 17 years old.

Several years ago, authorities cracked down after discovering rice in eastern China that had been polished with industrial oil to make it more attractive.

Counterfeit milk powder was linked to the death from malnutrition of at least 13 babies in 2004 in the eastern province of Anhui. (AGENCIES)

AIDS epidemic shifts, Vietnam makes policy change

HANOI, Dec 25: A stocky woman in blue jeans with spiky, gelled black hair dances on stage at one of Vietnam's rural rehabilitation centres, leading a hip-hop style chant.

''Hold hands together, we'll stop AIDS together,'' shouted the former heroin addict patient who returned to the rehabilitation centre to encourage over a thousand recovering drug users and prostitute inmates, a third of whom have HIV or AIDS.

People face stigma and discrimination when they leave the minimum security centres, especially if they are infected with HIV or have AIDS. HIV-infected people are often refused employment and their children denied schooling.

''Everybody should unite in combating this disease,'' said Danh Thu Hanh, 36, a former addict who spent two years as an inmate.

Hanh works as a supporter of a self-help group called Cactus Blossom, one of about 30 that have emerged in recent years in Vietnam to represent people living with HIV and AIDS.

Vietnam's epidemic is less advanced than its Southeast Asian neighbours Cambodia and Thailand, but the United Nations estimates there are at least 280,000 HIV infections in a population of 84 million.

Health authorities report that the number of new cases is rising rapidly at 100 new infections per day. There were an estimated 14,000 AIDS-related deaths in Vietnam in 2005.

More infections are now caused by sexual transmission than by injecting heroin with unsterile needles and syringes, a worrying change in the course of the epidemic as the Communist-run country works to prevent it spreading into the general population.

In the southern commercial hub of Ho Chi Minh City and in northeastern Haiphong city and Quang Ninh province on the border with China, the epidemic is becoming generalised, experts say.

NEW HIV/AIDS LAW

On January 1, a new law comes into effect that experts say is a broad policy framework for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in underdeveloped Vietnam.

The law strengthens the rights of people with HIV, calls for AIDS education in the workplace and HIV medicines to be included in health plans.

It also provides for condom distribution, clean-needle exchange programmes and the heroin substitute methadone as part of the response to the epidemic.

''There is certainly hope of reducing the epidemic because the knowledge level about HIV in Vietnam is high, programmes are expanding and use of condoms is going up,'' said UNAIDS country head Nancy Fee.

Places such as ''Education Labour Social Centre Number 2'' -- a cluster of mustard yellow buildings with red roofs in the lush green countryside near the capital Hanoi -- have existed for years to incarcerate heroin addicts and prostitutes.

But facing a drug use relapse rate of 70 to 90 per cent, coupled with the doubling of HIV infections in the past five years, the government is debating further reforms of the centres.

''They are thinking of introducing so-called open type of centres so that when people get addicted they can go to the centre voluntarily for detoxification and rehabilitation,'' said Tran Tien Duc, country director for HIV/AIDS advocacy group.

Centre no 2 in Yen Bai, Ha Tay province also has a kindergarten for 29 children orphaned or abandoned because they have HIV or are suspected by their parents of being infected.

When former US President Bill Clinton visited Hanoi on December 6 with his HIV/AIDS foundation to sign an agreement to provide more AIDS medicines for Vietnamese women and children, he tackled discrimination directly.

At a public event, Clinton put his arm supportively on the shoulders of an HIV-positive woman founder of a self-help group called Red Flamboyant and urged young people to talk more openly about HIV to reduce fear and ignorance of the disease.

Vietnam is the only country in Asia to receive United States government money as part of President George W Bush's $15 billion five-year global fund known as PEPFAR.

The US Embassy said nearly 80 million dollars has been dedicated to Vietnam so far for prevention, care and treatment.

CIVIL SOCIETY NEEDED

Vietnam's one-party rulers have opened the door to capitalism for businesses but the country has no independent civil society. Self-help groups are not legally recognised.

''For the new law to be really implemented it needs much greater involvement of people living with HIV and AIDS, civil society and a lot of monitoring,'' said Khuat Thi Hai Oanh, a department head in the semi-autonomous research group, the Institute for Social Development Studies.

The government has gone some way in recognising the need for change in attitudes. The Party this year instructed that the disease should no longer be referred to as a ''social evil'' although drug use and prostitution still are.

At centre No 2, the staff of guards, doctors and nurses supervise a structured life of exercise, work, job training and treatment from dawn until dusk for about 1,100 residents.

Dormitories of hard, metal-framed beds for men and women are separated by walls topped with barbed wire.

''Some have returned to the centre and of course it was disappointing but the issue here is that it is not easy to escape drugs and it takes time and will to do that,'' said centre director Nguyen Thi Phuong.

Resident Do Thi Huyen said she tried drugs because friends were users, but she was arrested and admitted to the centre.

''If I don't have HIV, I want to study, maybe open a shop to sell cosmetics and get married one day,'' the 23-year-old in a red sweater and black pants said quietly, her lips barely moving.

(AGENCIES)

Anti-Israel "rabbis" face fallout from Jewish world.

JERUSALEM, Dec 25: Jewish leaders from across the globe have decried the sight of six Jews with beards and black hats embracing Iran's president at a conference questioning the Holocaust, believing their gesture hurt the faith.

The Nazis' mass murder of six million Jews remains one of the most sensitive issues for Jewish people. Israel was partly founded as a haven for Holocaust survivors.

Jews continue to be alarmed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who since coming to power in 2005 has sparked international condemnation by terming the Holocaust ''a myth'' and calling for Israel to be ''wiped off the map''.

Despite this, a small cluster of Jews took part in the December conference. They say they went under the banner of Neturei Karta, a fringe ultra-Orthodox movement estimated by many commentators to number around 100, which does not recognise the state of Israel, and seeks its demise.

They believe Jews must remain stateless before the coming of the Messiah, and view the Zionist movement -- which established Israel

-- as an abomination before God for founding a state prematurely.

Even before the Tehran conference, the movement had angered many Jews by supporting former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and having ties with Islamist group Hamas.

The six Jewish visitors to the conference in Iran regard themselves as part of the Haredi community -- a very conservative branch of the Jewish faith, whose name in Hebrew means those ''fearful'' of sinning.

''PROPAGANDA TOOL''

But even in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Mea Sharim neighbourhood, home to many detractors of the Jewish state -- including some who share Neturei Karta's anti-Zionist beliefs -- many residents said those who attended the Tehran conference went a step too far.

''While we do not agree with the secular state of Israel, these people have desecrated the name of God,'' said Haim Freid, an ultra-Orthodox Jew who lives in Mea Sharim. ''They do not represent us.''

A spokeswoman for Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance body, said the group was ''an unfortunate caricature that has been used as a propaganda tool by the Iranian regime''.

Israel's Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger called on rabbis worldwide to ban the Jewish participants -- who were from the United States and Europe -- from synagogues.

Agudath Israel of America, which represents tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the US, said despite their Haredi garb, the six were a ''disgrace'' and ''dangerous'' to Jews.

The two-day Iranian government-sponsored conference was also attended by Westerners who have cast doubt on the Holocaust, even though some of the countries they come from have made it a crime to deny that it happened.

At the conference, Neturei Karta Rabbi Aharon Cohen said Germany had carried out ''a catastrophic policy and action of genocide'' on the Jews, but said it was open to question how many millions had perished.

Neturei Karta's leader in Israel, self-styled Rabbi Yisrael Hirsch, said while it ''hurt when people deny the Holocaust happened'' the Jews' participation in Tehran was important.

''The purpose was to reveal to the whole world that the Iranians do not have any hatred to Jews, they only oppose Zionism like we do,'' he said, surrounded by volumes of sacred Jewish scriptures at his modest home in Mea Sharim.

''We wanted to show that Zionism does not represent the Jewish people.''

Hirsch, a 51-year-old U.S. Citizen by birth who rejected Israeli citizenship, said he was unable to go to Tehran because he lived in Israel. Iran does not grant entry to visitors with Israeli entry stamps in their passports. Hirsch's father Moshe, a New York-born rabbi, was Arafat's adviser on Jewish affairs.

ANGER

Neturei Karta, Aramaic for ''guardians of the city'', was formed in Jerusalem in the 1930s as a bulwark against the growing Zionist movement in what was then British Mandate Palestine.

The large and influential Satmar Hassidic sect, which also opposes the state of Israel and believes Zionism is an ''idolatrous temptation'', is a traditional Neturei Karta ally but has increasingly distanced itself from the movement.

Satmar's United States-based rabbinical leadership described the Jews' attendance at the Tehran conference as ''acts of madness'' and called on Satmar disciples and others to shun those who ''give the go-ahead for the spilling of Jewish blood''.

Many in the ultra-Orthodox world believe Moshe Hirsch, now taking a back seat in the movement, steered Neturei Karta away from its principles and represents a breakaway sect by drawing it closer to militant Muslim figures opposed to Israel, like Hamas.

Israel Eichler, a former Israeli lawmaker and well-known Haredi commentator, described their activities as ''anachronistic'' and ''anarchistic''.

''Even the most anti-Zionist rabbis have declared that in facing the outside world we need to show a united front (with the state of Israel),'' he told Reuters.

Yisrael Hirsch is undeterred by those arguments.

''The majority of the Haredi world opposes Zionism in principle,'' he said. ''We are sure one day Israel will cease to exist just like the Soviet Union did.'' (AGENCIES)

Body of Indian found in toilet.

DUBAI, Dec 25: The body of an Indian real estate agent was found in mysterious circumstances in the public toilet of Dubai public transport station.

A cleaner on Saturday found the body of S A P Habib Rahman (45), in a standing position with his back against the toilet wall, news reports said.

Later, it was presumed that Rahman, apparently, died of a cardiac arrest while using the toilet on Friday afternoon. (UNI)

When faith and medicine collide

CHICAGO, Dec 25: Any nurse can walk into a bad situation. The one Luanne Linnard-Palmer can't forget came as she readied a little boy for a blood transfusion only to be told by his mother ''You know you're damning his soul to hell!''

The child's mother was a Jehovah's Witness, a faith that rejects blood transfusions. Her son had sickle cell anemia and had become extremely weak.

''It blew me away,'' Linnard-Palmer recalls years later. ''I worried not only about my own reaction but what was going to happen to this child with a lifelong disease.''

The incident planted the seeds for a newly published book by the California nurse, ''When Parents Say No: Religious and Cultural Influences on Pediatric Healthcare Treatment,'' published by Sigma Theta Tau International.

In the case that was seminal to the book, doctors went to court and got a four-hour guardianship of the child so they could carry out the transfusion against his mother's will.

The boy went home after the transfusion and the nurse who had been so affected by the case has no idea what happened to him after that.

''American families move, change jobs. There are no longitudinal studies looking at this, at what happens the next time they receive medical care,'' she said in an interview.

The challenges she recounts are both religious and cultural.

A 14-year-old Muslim girl with severe burns on her arm from a cooking oil spill was recovering after surgery until her parents heard the surgeon talk about a graft made with pig skin. They demanded it be removed and the girl was ultimately left with almost no function in her lower arm.

A preteen girl with a large and rapidly growing neck tumor was recommended for immediate chemotherapy but her family said they needed three to five days to pray with their Christian congregation beforehand. After officials threatened to take guardianship of the child, she was brought back for treatment after just one day.

''But the family had been willing to risk, not maybe death, but the need for immediate treatment in order to fulfill their duties spiritually,'' Linnard-Palmer said.

''Just recently we had an Hispanic mother who said through interpreters that in her background men were the decision makers. Her young son is a very brittle diabetic cared for by an uncle who loads him up with sugar after school,'' she said.

''So now he's very ill. But she said she couldn't go against the men in her house. If they're going to give him sodas and cookies they're going to do this,'' she added.

LAYING-ON OF HANDS

Linnard-Palmer, a pediatric nurse at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and a professor of nursing at Dominican University of California in San Rafael, believes that more time, training and money are being spent these days on helping medical personnel deal with religious and cultural issues when it comes to caring for children.

Large urban hospitals, which tend to have more resources, have been out in front. Her hospital has an hour-long conference every two weeks to discuss such problems, she said, and when an incident occurs there is intervention by psychologists and chaplains as well as medical personnel.

While the Jehovah's Witnesses are often mentioned, Linnard-Palmer says she has found increasing complications involving fundamental Christians.

''Over and over I see people who say they won't consent until they speak to a minister or have a laying-on of hands,''she added, causing delays in treatment but not necessarily refusals.

Gaining temporary guardianship through the courts is a well-established precedent, she said, though it does not happen all that often. It can have different results -- with some parents relieved that the matter has been taken out of their hands despite their wishes but others who are left in rage.

The extent of the problem in the United States has not been well documented. One often-quoted study published in the journal ''Pediatrics'' in 1998 found 141 deaths of children in the United States over a 20-year period who were denied medical treatment for religious reasons but whose survival rate with treatment would have exceeded 90 percent.

That study estimated that there were many more deaths which could not be documented.

Rita Swan, one of the authors of that study, told Reuters she believes the problem today is not as bad as it was in the United States 20 years ago. But she said the problem is still very difficult to measure since some religious groups are not forthcoming and deaths due to treatment delays are not always recorded with that as the cause.

''While we don't hear of as many deaths in faith-healing sects as we used to, opposition to vaccines, for example, is increasing and outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease are increasing, some tied to religious exemptions and some not,'' she added. (AGENCIES)

| home | state | national | business| editorial | advertisement | sports |
| international | weather | mailbag | suggestions | search | subscribe | send mail |