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Fourteen medical workers in Kyrgyzstan have been charged with malpractice and negligence after 42 children were infected with HIV.

The health workers, from the southern Osh region, are accused of negligence while administering injections and blood transfusions.

A spate of infections of HIV, the virus that causes Aids, has shocked the central Asian republic.

Kyrgyzstan has about 1,500 people with HIV out of a population of 5 million.

Those accused include doctors, nurses and a chief administrator. If convicted they face prison terms of between five and 10 years.

The BBC's Natalia Antelava in Almaty, in neighbouring Kazakhstan, points out that this is not the first such case in central Asia, and says the outbreak shows a dangerous trend of hospitals becoming the cause, rather than the cure, of infectious diseases across the region.

Concern over conditions

Last year, 21 medical workers were sentenced to prison terms for infecting 150 children with HIV in Kazakhstan.

The Kyrgyz case has deepened public concern over conditions in hospitals and the quality of health workers.

At least 30 other children tested positive for HIV since the investigation into the outbreak first began last summer, and new cases continue to emerge all the time.

The outbreak is surrounded by secrecy and confusion.

Our correspondent reports that in this predominantly Muslim and deeply traditional region, HIV care is an enormous stigma, and families are extremely protective of the identity of their children.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one international aid worker in Kyrgyzstan said that this stigma and the atmosphere of secrecy meant that outbreaks of hospital-acquired infections were extremely common, but most of them simply did not get reported.

BBC News

[OMEN]

Tibetans in China's tense southwestern province of Sichuan believe several people were killed in anti-Chinese riots there this week, disputing official claims that none died.

China's official Xinhua news agency reported overnight that police shot and wounded four protesters this week in a heavily ethnic Tibetan part of the province, where protests broke out after anti-Chinese riots in neighbouring Tibet a week ago.

The unrest has alarmed China, keen to look its best in the run-up to the August 8-24 Olympic Games in Beijing when it hopes to show the world that it has arrived as a world power.

Tensions remain high in Tibet, Sichuan and other neighbouring areas where the government has poured in troops.

Kangding, a heavily Tibetan town in Sichuan and a gateway to the restive region, was crowded with troops, some on patrol, some loudly practising martial arts moves in the town square.

Students at the local Tibetan-language school were locked in unless they had special permission to leave. Drivers said they were unwilling to travel into tense mountain towns.

"I'm in this to make money, but no matter how much you pay me I won't go that way," one Kangding driver said.

Two residents of Aba prefecture, where rioting began on Sunday, told Reuters they believed several died when police fired on protesters attacking officials and state buildings.

"Everyone here believes that our people died, maybe 10 or more," said one ethnic Tibetan resident.

"I'm not a supporter of violence and I oppose attacking people just because they're Han," he said, referring to the country's majority Han Chinese population.

Another Tibetan man said he hid in his home during the riot.

"I'm sure people died. We all know," he said in a brief telephone conversation. "We don't dare go out. They are arresting many people after what happened."

Both men asked not to be named, fearing punishment for talking to reporters. Other residents refused to say anything.

Troops and anti-riot police have set up roadblocks and are keeping out foreigners.

"With all the troops that have gone up there, it's under control now. They have tried for all those years to gain independence and failed. So it won't happen. Not now – it's impossible," said Ran Hongkui, a Chinese shopkeeper on the road between Kangding and Chengdu where convoy after convoy of armed police has passed.

Radio Free Asia, a US-funded broadcaster, said on Thursday up to 2,000 Buddhist monks and laypeople continued to protest in Huangnan Prefecture, Sichuan. The report could not be verified.

Authorities said they had arrested dozens of people involved in the Tibet protests.

More than 170 rioters have handed themselves in, the report said, offering a phone number for locals to inform on suspected protesters in return for secrecy and rewards.

State-run Tibet television continued to show footage of last week's riots, including scenes of maroon-robed monks hurling rocks at police, protesters kicking in shop fronts and plumes of black smoke from burned-out cars in the local capital Lhasa.

Its newsreaders echoed the central government insistence that the violence was orchestrated by exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, and his "Dalai clique" to agitate for independence and embarrass Beijing ahead of the Olympic Games.

The 72-year-old monk, who fled Tibet in 1959, says he is against the violence, only wants greater autonomy for his homeland and is willing to travel to Beijing for talks.

The Chinese press never gives the Dalai Lama sympathetic treatment, but has recently intensified its vilification of the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The Tibet Daily called him "a faithful tool of Western anti-China forces, the general source of social chaos in Tibet".

And in a commentary the previous day, it wrote: "Since defecting abroad, the Dalai clique and its hangers-on have... never given up on hoping to restore their corrupt, dissolute theocracy and their privileges as feudal rulers and serf masters."

China's response to the rioting has triggered international criticism and some calls to boycott the Games opening ceremony.

In a phone call with Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged China to show restraint towards protesters. Yang told her the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, was to blame for the riots.

"They attempted to exert pressure on the Chinese government, disturb the 2008 Beijing Olympics and sabotage China's social stability and harmony," Xinhua quoted him as saying.

China says 13 "innocent civilians" died in anti-Chinese riots last week in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, after police broke up earlier peaceful protests led by monks. Exiled Tibetans say as many as 100 Tibetans have died.

Reuters

[OMEN]

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has dismissed suggestions he might take on the job of mediating in the Darfur crisis in Sudan.

A Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), on Sunday demanded direct peace talks with the Sudanese government and said Annan should mediate.

Annan, who recently brokered an end to a crisis in Kenya, told reporters in New York part of the reason for his success there was having a single mediator speaking with one voice for the international community.

Asked whether he might get involved in Sudan, Annan said: "I think we have some very able people dealing with that and we should leave it with them."

UN envoy Jan Eliasson and African Union envoy Salim Ahmed Salim are leading efforts to mediate between various rebel groups and the Khartoum government to end a war that began in 2003 when non-Arab rebels took up arms.

Annan said he had talked with Salim and Eliasson about the rebel group's call for him to get involved, and advised the two mediators to carry on doing their jobs.

Salim and Eliasson had hoped to end the conflict with negotiations that started in the Libyan city of Sirte in October. But JEM and other prominent rebel bodies boycotted the talks and they fizzled out.

Eliasson and Salim have been trying to persuade rebel groups to arrange fresh negotiations ever since, but only a handful of factions have agreed.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been forced from their homes in the five years of revolt in Darfur.

Washington calls the violence genocide, a term European governments are reluctant to use and Khartoum rejects.

Annan said the crisis raised doubts about whether the international community, through the United Nations, was living up to its "responsibility to protect" – a principle adopted by UN member states officially in 2005.

In a speech at a dinner later where he was accepting the MacArthur Award for International Justice from the MacArthur Foundation, which promotes human rights and justice, Annan said the world should have learned from the genocide in Rwanda and its failure to stop war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

He said the responsibility to protect placed a heavy burden on the Security Council and its members.

"It is fair to question whether all of them have yet fully lived up to that responsibility, notably in Darfur," he said, according to a text of the speech issued in advance.

A joint UN-African Union mission took over peacekeeping duties on December 31, but with only 9000 of the required 26,000 troops and police on the ground it has not been able to do its job properly.

Western powers have tried to raise pressure on Sudan through the UN Security Council but China, which holds a veto, has blocked sanctions against its close ally, Khartoum

Reuters

[OMEN]

LIQUID LAYER: An artist's illustration of hydrocarbon pools, icy and rocky terrain on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. Some astronomers believe an ocean of water and ammonia may lie beneath the surface of the moon.
A vast ocean of water and ammonia may lurk deep beneath the surface of Titan, the intriguing, orange moon of Saturn already known for its blanket of clouds and dense atmosphere, scientists said.

Astronomers have not directly observed this ocean. But they said observations made by the Cassini spacecraft of Titan's rotation and shifts in the location of surface features suggest an ocean exists perhaps 60 miles under the surface.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon and the second biggest in the solar system, only slightly smaller than Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Titan's diameter of about 3,200 miles is larger than the planet Mercury and the dwarf planet Pluto.

Cassini, exploring Saturn and its moons in an ongoing US-European mission, collected measurements using radar that penetrated Titan's thick clouds during 19 passes over the moon from October 2005 to May 2007.

Data from the early observations allowed researchers to establish the locations of 50 landmarks including lakes, canyons and mountains on Titan's surface. They looked at later radar data and discovered that prominent surface features had shifted location by up to 19 miles.

The spin of Titan's crust is linked to winds blowing through its atmosphere, the scientists said. But the type of broad displacement of surface features seen on Titan would be hard to explain unless its crust were separated from its core by an internal ocean, allowing the crust essentially to float.

"It's because Titan's crust seems to be so mobile that we infer this internal ocean," Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, who directed the research published in the journal Science, said in a telephone interview.

Lorenz said this ocean was probably mostly water with "a few per cent" ammonia.

Its atmosphere is mostly made up of nitrogen, with other hydrocarbon elements that give Titan its orange colour.

Titan's atmosphere consists of compounds that may have existed in the Earth's primordial atmosphere, but Titan may have more of certain chemicals like methane and ethane.

"Titan is definitely one of the most Earth-like, if not the most Earth-like, landscapes in the solar system – and probably has the most Earth-like weather," Lorenz said.

"It's very much colder than the Earth. But the same processes that go on in our own weather, particularly the formation of clouds and rain, happen on Titan – but with liquid methane not with water," Lorenz added.

Titan is thought to have hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, with hydrocarbons raining from the sky and collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

Scientists have found evidence suggesting underground oceans on other moons in the solar system including Jupiter's Europa, Callisto and Ganymede and Saturn's Enceladus.

Reuters