US judge blocks Lloyd Webber's NY Picasso sale

NEW YORK, Nov 7: British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's art foundation has temporarily been stopped by a US judge from selling a Picasso painting worth up to 60 million dollars after a German man claimed he owned the piece.

The painting from Picasso's Blue Period, ''Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto,'' is due to be sold at Christie's in New York tomorrow and the auction house has valued the piece at between 40 million dollars and 60 million dollars.

But Julius Schoeps has sued Lloyd Webber's foundation, saying he is an heir of a Jewish banker from Berlin who was forced to sell the painting in 1934 as a ''consequence of Nazi persecution,'' court documents showed yesterday.

US Judge Jed Rakoff has temporarily halted the sale of the 1903 painting, also known as ''The Absinthe Drinker,'' until the matter is heard on Tuesday.

Christie's has possession of the painting, of an elegantly dressed friend of Picasso's sitting solemnly at a table with a glass before him. Proceeds from its sale are due to benefit unidentified charities.

(AGENCIES)

China scientists call bird flu paper "unscientific"

BEIJING, Nov 7: Chinese Government scientists have rejected international scientists' claims that a new strain of H5N1 bird flu has emerged in coastal China and may spread across Asia and Europe, state media reported.

The director of China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, Chen Hualan, and the director of influenza research at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shu Yuelong, said no ''Fujian-like'' strain of bird flu had spread among the country's birds and human victims.

''This viewpoint and conclusion have no scientific basis,'' Chen told the official Xinhua news agency, rejecting a paper published last week in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.Pnas.Org).

''The paper's so-called 'Fujian-like virus' is not a new strain,'' she said late last night. ''These viruses are quite stable genetically and have not shown any major changes in resistance,'' he added.

Scientists worldwide are grappling with the risk that H5N1 bird flu, which has spread widely among fowl and can infect and kill humans in close contact with infected birds, may mutate into a deadly version that spreads easily between humans.

China's official scientific counter-blast came after scientists in Hong Kong and the United States said they had found the new strain of H5N1 virus in China and warned it could have started another wave of outbreaks in birds across Southeast Asia.

The strain is called the ''Fujian-like virus'' because it was first isolated in eastern China's Fujian province in March 2005.

It has been detected increasingly widely since October 2005 in poultry in six provinces in China, said Guan Yi and Malik Peiris from the University of Hong Kong, and Rob Webster of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in the United States.

The strain might also have become resistant to vaccines, which China began using on a large scale from September 2005 to protect poultry from H5N1, they said.

But the two Chinese scientists said the Fujian virus was not a new strain and was, genetically, over 99 percent consistent with the bird flu that appeared in southern China in early 2004.

Chen accused the Hong Kong and US researchers of ''unscientific methods'' and said China's current vaccination programme was effective.

She also acknowledged a new strain of the H5N1 virus had been found in northern China in early 2006, and said China had already reported this finding to international animal health authorities.

Shu, the Chinese influenza expert, rejected the international scientists' conclusion that the new Fujian strain was behind recent human infections in China.

China's latest official comment in the controversy appears unlikely to still concerns. The World Health Organisation has said the new strain of the H5N1 virus has not shown any mutation that would enable it to spread easily among people.

But the UN health body has expressed frustration with Chinese agriculture officials for not quickly sharing virus samples with international researchers to allow better understanding of bird flu's spread and evolution. (AGENCIES)

Third US serviceman admits guilt in Iraqi killing

CAMP PENDLETON, CALIF, Nov 7: A US Marine admitted in a military court that his squad deliberately gunned down an Iraqi man in April and then agreed to lie that they had a legitimate reason to kill him.

Lance Cpl Tyler Jackson, 23, of Tracy, California, said he agreed to go along with the plan to kill an Iraqi man they believed was a terrorist during a patrol near the village of Hamdania.

''Everyone there verbally agreed. Not much more was said,'' Jackson told a court-martial at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base north of San Diego yesterday.

Jackson pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated assault and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The judge, Marine Lt. Col Joseph Lisiecki, accepted the guilty pleas and set the sentencing hearing for November 16.

Jackson, who has been held in a military brig since late May, could face up to 15 years in prison.

Under a pretrial agreement with military prosecutors, he is expected to receive a lesser punishment in exchange for his cooperation and testimony against five other members of his squad charged in the death.

Jackson is the third member of the unit to plead guilty to charges related to the killing.

Unit members have testified the plan by squad leader Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins was to nab Saleh Gowad, whom they suspected participated in attacks against the Marines, including a roadside explosion that killed four members of their unit.

That night, four of the men grabbed not Gowad but another man in the village, tied him up, dragged him to a hole on a road, and then all eight of the men fired their weapons at the man, Jackson said.

Jackson said he went along with the plan to kill Gowad because he agreed with it.

According to his testimony, only later did Jackson realize that they had actually grabbed and killed another man, Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, a former Iraqi policeman.

Jackson said he too got in a line at the sergeant's behest and fired, but aimed above the man's head.

''I knew he was going to be shot. I didn't want to be the one doing it,'' he told the judge.

The eight men agreed to stick to the story that he was shot after getting into a firefight with the Marines, Jackson said.

''We would tell the story that the man was digging an IED along the road,'' he said, referring to a bomb known as an improvised explosive device. If they were ever questioned, they would say ''it was a good shot, a lawful engagement,'' he added.

Jackson is one of seven Marines and a sailor with a platoon belonging to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, an infantry unit based at Camp Pendleton, charged in the Iraqi's death.

In addition to the sailor, Jackson is the second Marine to plead guilty in the case.

The five others face charges including premeditated murder.(AGENCIES)

US urged to keep pressing Vietnam on religion curbs

WASHINGTON, Nov 7: A Government panel has urged the United States to keep Vietnam on a list of serious violators of religious freedom, saying the communist state's reform of policies on faith did not go far enough.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said Vietnam should remain on the State Department's upcoming 2006 list of ''countries of particular concern'' despite Hanoi's relaxation of some curbs under an agreement with Washington last year.

''Severe restrictions on religious freedom and abuses continue in Vietnam in all of the areas cited by the State Department when Vietnam was designated a CPC (country of particular concern) in 2004,'' the commission said in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday.

The letter by Commission Chair Felice Gaer also urged Rice to ''prominently discuss religious freedom concerns'' when she visits Vietnam next week for an Asia-Pacific conference also to be attended by President George W. Bush.

The Commission said Vietnam continued to arrest religious leaders or keep them under house arrest and cited cases of forced renunciations of faith among ethnic minority Protestants and monks and nuns of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam.

''Vietnam's new laws on religion are being used to restrict and control freedom rather than protect it,'' Gaer wrote.

The United States should keep Vietnam on the religious freedom watchlist to press further Vietnamese changes, the commission said. It recommended US assistance programs to support legal reform, economic development for ethnic minorities, and to develop civil society.

The 2005 State Department report to the US Congress named Vietnam, China, North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Eritrea as severe violators of religious rights. (AGENCIES)

New California wildfire erupts day after memorial

LOS ANGELES, Nov 7: A new California wildfire broke out near a community east of Los Angeles, one day after some 10,000 people attended a memorial service for firefighters killed fighting a massive arson fire.

The new fire, fanned by hot Santa Ana winds, erupted at about 7:30 am local time yesterday near the intersection of two major Southern California freeways about 60 miles (96 km) east of Los Angeles.

The flames quickly charred some 300 acres (121 hectares) threatened hundreds of homes and a golf course near the city of Rialto and burned a yard where wooden pallets were stored. Firefighters used aircraft to scoop water from a pond on the golf course as smoke and ash drifted across a large swath of Southern California.

The fire was quickly contained by firefighters but the resurgent Santa Ana winds, which blow seasonally in the region, prompted firefighters to issue a red flag warning -- meaning high fire danger.

Stands of bone-dry trees and brush and the Santa Ana winds combine every fall for what authorities call Southern California's fire season, and this year has proven to be no exception.

On Sunday, thousands of firefighters lined roads and some 10,000 people flocked to an open air theater for an emotional farewell to the five firefighters who died trying to save a home in a remote area during the October fire.

Three of the five, all of whom worked for the U.S. Forest Service, died instantly and the others died later of massive burns received on the first day of a five-day blaze that destroyed 34 homes. It also charred an area nearly three times the size of Manhattan near Banning, about 90 miles (145 km) east of Los Angeles and not far from the desert resort of Palm Springs.

Authorities, who issued a $500,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case, charged a local man on Thursday with arson and five counts of murder. He could face life in prison or the death penalty if convicted.

Though the firefighters' deaths stunned Southern Californians, the blaze did not match the sheer destruction of wildfires that burned for days outside Los Angeles and San Diego in October of 2003, killing 24 people, destroying 3,000 homes and burning some 740,000 acres (300,000 hectares). (AGENCIES)

Saturn moon gives clues about early life on Earth

WASHINGTON, Nov 7: Billions of years ago, Earth may have been shrouded in a blanket of atmospheric haze like that seen on Saturn's moon Titan, providing organic material that nourished our planet's earliest life forms, researchers said.

Some scientists look to Titan as a model for what early Earth's atmosphere may have looked like.

They think Titan's atmosphere, packed with organic aerosol particles created when sunlight reacts with methane gas, may offer clues about Earth's climate when primitive organisms were first arising 3.6 billion years ago.

University of Colorado scientist Margaret Tolbert and her colleagues conducted laboratory experiments based on conditions in Titan's atmosphere measured last year by the Huygens space probe during the NASA-European Space Agency's Cassini mission.

They irradiated methane gas with an ultraviolet lamp, then mixed in carbon dioxide to see whether conditions that may have existed eons ago on Earth could yield a comparable organic haze. They found that such a haze formed in the lab using various methane and carbon dioxide concentrations.

Tolbert said the chemical composition of the haze was organic molecules that are digestible to organisms alive today and could have nourished simple living organisms along ago.

''That would have been a food source for any budding life,'' Tolbert said in an interview yesterday. ''And it would have been, importantly, a global food source. And so life, instead of being confined to certain very special environments, could have thrived in every puddle.''

Scientists previously have concentrated on isolated, extreme environments such as hydrothermal vents bursting with energy and nutrients to understand primordial life.

Beyond merely providing a food source for early life forms, this organic haze also may have played a role in providing the very building blocks needed for living organisms to first form, Tolbert said.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Earth was formed perhaps 4.6 billion years ago and liquid water was present about 3.8 billion years ago. Tolbert said this haze may have been a dominant feature of Earth's early atmospheric landscape from about the time of the first evidence of life 3.6 billion years ago until the rise of the oxygen content about 2.3 billion years ago.

The thick haze not only may have nourished organisms, but may have protected them from harmful ultraviolet rays. The haze may have placed more than 100 million tonnes of organic material on Earth's surface annually, the study estimated.

''It's exciting to see that the early Earth experiments produced so much organic matter,'' Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute in California, said in a statement.(AGENCIES)

Few Americans favor abstinence-only sex education

NEW YORK, Nov 7: Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, favor comprehensive sex education in schools over abstinence-only programs, according to researchers.

Currently, the federal government champions the abstinence-only approach, giving around 170 million dollars each year to states and community groups to teach just-say-no sex education. This funding precludes mention of birth control and condoms, unless it's to emphasize their failure rates.

However, critics point out that studies have failed to show that abstinence-only education delays sex or lowers rates of teen pregnancy.

This latest study, according to the authors, suggests that the federal government is out of step not only with research, but also with public opinion.

Of the nearly 1,110 US adults they surveyed, 82 percent supported programs that discuss abstinence as well as other methods for preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Half were in outright opposition to abstinence-only education.

Even among self-described conservatives, 70 percent supported comprehensive sex ed., while 40 percent opposed the abstinence-only strategy.

The findings ''highlight a gap between policy, and science and public opinion,'' said Dr. Amy Bleakley of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and lead author of the new study.

Whether this divide will influence policy-makers is unknown, she told Reuters Health yesterday. ''We just want to bring this to their attention,'' she said.

Bleakley and her colleagues report the findings in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

To receive federal funding, abstinence-only programs must meet eight criteria set down in 1996. Among these is the stipulation that abstinence until marriage be taught as the ''expected standard of human sexual activity.''

Only a handful of studies have examined the effectiveness of such programs, and the results have been mixed, according to an editorial published with the study.

Many more studies have looked at comprehensive sex ed. And found that some programs do increase condom and contraceptive use, but may also help delay sex, writes Dr. Douglas Kirby of ETR Associates in Scotts Valley, California.

ETR Associates is a non-profit company that researches and develops health programs, including STD and pregnancy prevention programs for schools.

''Until we have strong evidence that particular abstinence-only programs are effective,'' Kirby argues, ''we certainly should relax the funding restrictions and fund programs (including comprehensive programs) that effectively delay sex among young people.''

Bleakley agreed with that conclusion. But beyond the issue of balance in funding, she said, is the fact that there is evidence comprehensive sex education can help prevent the potential consequences of teen sex -- including HIV and other STDs.(AGENCIES)

Paris suburb bus drivers strike over arson attack

PARIS, Nov 7: Hundreds of bus drivers went on strike last night, refusing to drive through Paris suburbs after an attack on one of their company's buses near the French capital, a trade union source said.

Three vandals tried to set fire to one of the firm's buses on Sunday in the Paris suburb of Tremblay-en-France. Suburban buses have been targeted in a wave of arson attacks in the past fortnight roughly a year after suburban riots rocked France.

Drivers of the Courriers d'Ile-de-France (CIF) company in three departments bordering Paris walked off the job for 24 hours, saying their working conditions were unsafe and demanding that police or security guards accompany them on their rounds.

The drivers were blocking 117 lines and had gathered in a bus depot in Tremblay-en-France, the union source said.

One attack on a bus in the southern city of Marseille over a week ago left one woman badly burned.

(AGENCIES)

South Korean stem cell scientist sues for old job

SEOUL, Nov 7: Disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who was fired from one of the country's top universities after his team falsified landmark papers, is suing to get his old job back, his lawyer said.

Hwang, who was sacked by Seoul National University in March and is on trial in a criminal fraud case related to his work, said in a court filing he was unfairly dismissed due to distorted evidence, his lawyer, Lee Geon-haeng, said by telephone.

An investigation panel at the university said in a report in January that Hwang's team knowingly fabricated key data in two groundbreaking papers on embryonic stem cells that have since been retracted by the journal Science, which published them.

Hwang, once celebrated as a national hero, was indicted in May on charges of fraud and embezzlement after prosecutors said he was the mastermind of a scheme to make it look like his team had produced stem cells from cloned human embryos.

Prosecutors have charged Hwang with committing fraud to secure funds and misusing 2.8 billion won (2.97 million dollars) in state funds and private donations, as well as violating bioethics laws in procuring human eggs for research.

Hwang, who has apologised for fraud in his team's work, has denied any wrongdoing and said he was duped by junior researchers into believing the landmark results.

Hwang's work had raised hopes because it seemed to fulfil a promise of embryonic stem cell studies where tissue could be grown to repair damaged bodies and cure illnesses such as Parkinson's disease and severe spinal cord injuries. (AGENCIES)

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