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[OMEN]

Vietnam, one of the countries hardest-hit by bird flu, will start a human vaccine trial this month, a military medical official has said.

The official did not give a specific date but said the Health Ministry had approved testing that would last eight months at the Military Medical Academy in Ha Tay province near Hanoi.

"We are going to conduct the tests at the academy, with people joining on a voluntary basis, including students and employees," said the official, who asked not to be identified in the media.

The academy had been licensed by the Ministry of Health to conduct the trial but it still required permission from the Ministry of Defence, the official said.

A company run by the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology said in a statement on its website that it would produce six million doses per year for application on both humans and poultry should the tests be successful.

Five people have died of bird flu in Vietnam so far this year out of six reported H5N1 infections. The World Health Organisation has recorded 51 deaths in Vietnam since late 2003 out of 235 people killed among 372 known cases globally.

WHO in Vietnam said it was not directly involved in the Communist-run Southeast Asian country's development of a human vaccine for the H5N1 virus.

"Our understanding is that this would be for local issue only and that the Ministry of Health has rigorous guidelines for quality control," said Dida Connor, WHO spokeswoman in Hanoi.

The Company for Vaccine and Biological Production No.1, known as Vabiotech, said in its statement that the vaccine used for poultry would be 1.5 microgram per dose, or one tenth the dose for humans.

On March 2, GlaxoSmithKline company said a vaccine it designed to protect people against H5N1 may be effective in warding off a few different sub-types of the virus.

In an Asian clinical trial involving 1206 adults in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, the vaccine produced antibodies that not only neutralised the H5N1 virus found in Vietnam, but also the variant now dogging Indonesia.

A vaccine designed using a current H5N1 strain might not offer protection against other strains and might even be useless against any eventual pandemic strain because viruses mutate all the time.

Still, experts say the process of making vaccines will lay down the necessary infrastructure so that the time used to make an eventual pandemic vaccine - anywhere between 4 to 6 months after a pandemic begins - can be shortened

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Reuters

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[OMEN]

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has offered to resume talks with self-ruled Taiwan which China claims as its own but warned the island that passage of a contentious referendum on UN membership would disrupt ties.

Taiwan, ruled separately from China since the end of a civil war in 1949, will hold a referendum on UN membership alongside presidential elections on Saturday, ignoring warnings from the United States, France, Japan and China.

"We hope to resume peace talks across the Straits as soon as possible under the one China principle. Any questions can be addressed, including such major issues as ending the hostile state between the two sides," Wen told a news conference.

"Anyone who wants to separate Taiwan from the motherland will not succeed and is doomed to fail," Wen said.

China opposed the referendum because it would change Beijing's cherished policy that both the island and the mainland belong to a single country, Wen said.

China insists the democratic island should eventually be returned to the fold, by force if necessary.

Su Chi, deputy manager for Taiwan's main opposition Nationalist Party candidate Ma Ying-jeou, who favours closer ties with China, said there was nothing new in Wen's comments.

"It looks like there's no change," Su told Reuters. "It's just reiteration. So we will reiterate that the future of cross-Strait relations is for the 23 million citizens of Taiwan to decide."

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, the island's main policy making body for China relations, had no immediate comment.

Reuters

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A group of Liberian women refugees who have held naked protests by the roadside are to be deported from Ghana, a minister has told the BBC.

Hundreds of the women were arrested on Monday and taken away from a refugee camp in 10 buses, witnesses say.

They were protesting at plans to send them home with $100 - they demand $1,000 and to be resettled in the West.

Stripping naked is a traditional form of protest amongst poor and powerless women in Africa.

Interior Minister Kwamena Bartels said that the Liberian war had ended. He denied it was forced repatriation.

He said they had broken local laws by not informing the police of their protest.

"When women strip themselves naked and stand by a major highway, that is not a peaceful demonstration," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

He said they would be deported later this week.

Some 27,000 Liberians are in Ghana after years of conflict at home.

But the civil war ended in 2003.

Some of the refugees told the BBC they had been beaten by the Ghanaian police at Buduburam camp, west of the capital, Accra.

They refuse to be integrated into local society and say they will continue protesting at the UN refugee agency's offer.

"$100 is not anything you can start life with. We are all lost," one woman said.

BBC News

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Never would have though stripping naked was a form of protest.

[OMEN]

AN Australian woman faces execution in Vietnam, after an appeals court upgraded her life jail term for heroin trafficking.

The Court of Appeals yesterday accepted a proposal by prosecutors in Ho Chi Minh City to upgrade the sentence for Jasmine Luong, 34, an Australian of Vietnamese origin, the state-run Liberation Saigon newspaper said.

She now has 15 days to appeal against the sentence to the president.

Luong was arrested at the city's Tan Son Nhat International Airport while boarding a flight to Melbourne in February last year after Customs officials found 1.55kg of heroin in her shoes and luggage.

Trafficking of more than 600 grams of heroin is punishable by death or life imprisonment in Vietnam. Executions are carried out by firing squad.

Several Australians of Vietnamese descent have been arrested for trafficking heroin to Australia from Vietnam in recent years

reuters

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US-led coalition troops killed three men, two children and a woman, in a raid in southeastern Afghanistan, the district chief and village residents said today.

They said the victims, from the families of two brothers, were all civilians, but the US military said the two brothers were involved in conducting improvised explosive device operations.

The issue of civilian casualties is a sensitive one as it undermines public support for the presence of foreign troops and the pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai.

"We will join the jihad'' and "Death to Bush'', chanted residents of the village of Muqibel in the province of Khost where the incident happened overnight.

Foreign troops raided two adjacent houses belonging to two brothers and killed three men, two children and a woman from the two families, district governor Gul Qasim said.

The children, both boys no older than 10-years-old bore bullet wounds to the head and chest, a witness said.

A large angry crowd of men gathered as villagers helped the local imam wash the bodies before burial. Women could be heard screaming and wailing from inside the houses.

Troops were searching the compounds for one of the brothers when they came under fire, the US military said.

"Several armed militants, two of whom were barricaded in a building, opened fire on coalition forces after they entered the compound,'' coalition spokesman Major Chris Belcher said in a statement.

"Coalition forces returned fire killing Bismullah, his brother Rahim Jan, as well as several other armed militants.''

Troops discovered the bodies of a woman and a child in the buildings after the fighting, the statement said, blaming the militants for putting the woman and child in harm's way.

Two men were detained during the raid, the US military and residents said.

The US-led coalition has about 7,000 troops in Afghanistan, separate from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), involved in anti-terror operations.

The killings came a day after two members of parliament said ISAF planes had killed more than 30 people, including civilians, in the southern province of Helmand.

ISAF denied any civilians were killed in the airstrike which it said killed around 12 Taliban insurgents travelling in three vehicles on an isolated road some distance from any houses.

It was impossible to independently verify the conflicting accounts

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reuters