World highlights

O Six people in eastern Turkey, four of them children, are being tested for possible avian influenza, the state Anatolian news agency said yesterday. The agency said a 35-year-old woman and a five-year-old child had been sent to hospital yesterday in the city of Van, near the Iranian border. Earlier, four children aged between 11 and 15 from the same family, were admitted to the Van hospital after exhibiting flu symptoms and failing to respond to antibiotics, the Hurriyet newspaper said.

O Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will undergo a minor heart operation on Thursday and be admitted to hospital overnight, his office announced yesterday. Mr Sharon, 77, is to undergo a catheterisation, the statement said. Doctors said last week the procedure was needed to repair a tiny hole to his heart thought to have contributed to a mild stroke he suffered on December 18.

O A slightly weakened Tropical Storm Zeta lingered over the open Atlantic yesterday, a month after the end of the official Atlantic and Caribbean hurricane season. The 27th named storm of a season that broke a whole catalogue of weather records, Zeta's centre was about 1,795 kilometres southwest of Portugal's Azores islands at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT), the US National Hurricane Centre said.

O Spaniards working on New Year's Day were driven onto the chilly streets to smoke as a new ban on smoking in public places came into effect yesterday, but in Madrid's typical smoky bars the law was widely ignored. Spain is Europe's second biggest per capita consumer of tobacco after Greece, according to market researchers Euromonitor, and until now many Spaniards still smoked at work.

O Snow and rain across northern Pakistan grounded relief flights yesterday, giving earthquake survivors and rescuers their first big test of the winter. But aid workers were not letting it dampen their optimism that the relief operation installed since the October 8 quake will prevent the winter adding large numbers to the 73,000 killed by the tremor, barring another quake or exceptional cold.

O Syria's ruling Baath Party has expelled former Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam for treason, the official news agency SANA reported yesterday, two days after he criticised the president from exile in France. "Khaddam has betrayed the party, the homeland and the (Arab) nation. The Nationalist Command has decided to expel him from the party," SANA quoted a party statement as saying.

O Iran yesterday confirmed that nine of its soldiers were "missing" after a little-known Sunni Muslim rebel group said it had kidnapped them, the official IRNA news agency reported. Citing an "informed Foreign Ministry source" IRNA said border guards were investigating the fate of nine soldiers who went missing from their post close to Iran's border with Pakistan.

O Five children and a woman were burned to death in their home yesterday by a rival family over a dispute about missing buffaloes in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, police said. The gruesome incident took place at dawn in Raghopur town, about 40 kilometres southeast of Patna, the state's capital.