Christmas tills ring out in Bethlehem

"Jingle Bells" rang out over Manger Square yesterday as Bethlehem opened a Christmas market that the Palestinian city hopes will help cap a boom year for tourism with a profitable festive season.

"It has been an excellent year," Bethlehem's mayor Victor Batarseh said, forecasting 1.25 million visitors by the end of 2008 and noting a halving in local unemployment. "We don't have any empty beds. Two years ago, all the hotels were empty."

Trade in the biblical birthplace of Jesus was devastated when a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation began in 2000 - months after a papal visit and millennium celebrations had seemed to lock in a rosy future for Bethlehem as a magnet for tourists and pilgrims in a region aglow with hopes for peace.

Pope condemns 'senseless' violence

Pope Benedict prayed yesterday for the victims of what he called "senseless" violence in Mumbai and Nigeria, where hundreds of people have been killed.

"The causes and circumstances of these tragic events are different, but the horror and the condemnation for the explosion of such a cruel and senseless violence must be one," the Pope said after his weekly Angelus blessing in St Peter's Square, the Vatican, yesterday.

Militants killed nearly 200 people in Mumbai last week, while clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs in the central Nigerian city of Jos left around 400 people dead.

The Pope said he was asking God to "touch the heart of those who delude themselves this is the way to resolve local or international problems".

Homemade liquor kills twelve

Twelve people in southern Iran have died after drinking homemade liquor and dozens more have been blinded or are in a serious condition, health workers in the Islamic Republic said yesterday.

Alcohol is banned in the Islamic Republic, which has enforced Islamic sharia law since its 1979 Islamic revolution.

The tiny minority of Iran's Christians, who mainly live in northern Iran, are permitted to make alcohol for personal consumption.

"Out of 92 who were poisoned from drinking homemade alcohol and hospitalised, 12 people died," said Farshid Abedi, head of Hormuzgan medical school, adding that the dead were aged between 29 and 42.

Mr Abedi said that four had been blinded and 69 people aged between 29 and 45 were in a criticial state, with nine in a coma. Mr Abedi did not identify the religion of the victims. At least some of the victims had been at a wedding party.

150 whales die off Australian coast

At least 150 whales have died in a mass stranding off Tasmania's west coast, Australian authorities said yesterday, despite the efforts of rescuers who managed to shepherd a small number back to the ocean.

The state government said the number of long-finned pilot whales that had perished had climbed to 150 after a body count yesterday.

The stranded whales were discovered on Saturday and members of the local community and government officials worked to rescue them, but the whales had been badly injured by the rocks.

Department of Primary Industries and Water spokesman Warwick Brennan said rescuers in a boat managed to steer about 30 whales out of the bay.

Mass strandings of whales occur for reasons that are not entirely understood. Theories include disturbance of echo-location, possibly by interference from sound produced by human activities at sea.

Heroin prescription for addicts?

Swiss voters looked set yesterday to approve a proposal allowing heroin addicts to obtain the drug under prescription.

The first 20 of the country's 26 cantons to publish results of a referendum all voted in favour of a prescription scheme approved by Parliament earlier this year, making permanent an experimental programme that has been in place since 1994. The referendum was instigated by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), seeking to overturn Parliament's decision.

Advocates of the programme have said that allowing addicts to be prescribed heroin makes them less likely to turn to crime to pay for their habit, and that the treatment can lower mortality rates. Critics argue the scheme has done little to encourage users to give up the drug.

At the beginning of 2008, nearly 1,300 addicts were being prescribed heroin out of 26,000 undergoing treatment, many of whom were receiving the synthetic substitute methadone.