Professional Pharmacy Online

Aid groups in Congo have secured the release of more than 200 child soldiers from militia fighters who forcibly recruited them in the east of the country, the U.N. children’s agency said Saturday.

Humanitarian agencies working in the region to dissuade armed groups from drafting children into their ranks had conducted an intensive campaign to secure the releases, said Pernille Ironside, a UNICEF protection officer based in the city of Goma, near the Rwandan border.

About 29,000 children have been demobilized and separated from armed groups in Congo since 2004. But hundreds of children soldiers - maybe a couple thousand - are still believed to be working with armed groups in the area, Ironside said. (Content Read …)

The rich red hue of Myanmar’s prized rubies is a reminder to many gem dealers of the military government’s bloody crackdown on democracy advocates, and talk of a boycott is increasing.

“There is a growing awareness that it is a fascist regime,” said Brian Leber, a third generation American gem dealer.

“Considering what this regime has done to its own people, we’re troubled to see that a precious stone is offering such a great source of cash for them,” he said in a telephone interview from the Chicago suburb of Western Springs, Ill.

“Trade in these stones supports human rights abuses,” New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement this week. (Content Read …)

The detention of Sergei Storchak, one of the country’s top authorities on international financial relations, prompted fevered speculation in the Russian media that the inquiry could have a political element amid growing uncertainty about President Vladimir Putin’s future.

It has also raised new questions among many investors about corruption in Russia and what the government was doing to fight it.

Storchak was detained Thursday, one day before he was supposed to accompany Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin on a trip to South America.

(Content Read …)

Letter from London is Larry Miller’s weekly look at news from across the pond.

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For the British and other Europeans, there has rarely been a better time to visit America. The weak dollar makes the U.S. bargain basement for nearly everything. That, and coast to coast tourist attractions should mean this is the destination of choice. But for many it isn’t anymore.

Official figures show a half a million fewer Brits traveled to the U.S. last year than in 2000, down 11-percent, while their visits to Turkey, the Caribbean, India and New Zealand are all considerably higher.

Because more than four million Britons still come to the U.S., it’s tempting to dismiss the downturn, until you consider the hard figures. (Content Read …)

Washington’s No. 2 diplomat had an all-important sitdown with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on Saturday after talking by phone overnight with one of the military ruler’s chief rivals, hoping that face-to-face diplomacy would convince the general to move back toward democracy.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte’s trip was seen as a last best chance to avoid political turmoil in Pakistan, which has seen its Supreme Court purged and thousands of protesters detained since Musharraf declared emergency rule on Nov. 3.

Joining Musharraf and Negroponte in the meeting, which went on for more than two hours, was Pakistan’s deputy army commander, Gen. (Content Read …)

A Japanese fleet will set sail Sunday on its largest ever whaling program in the South Pacific that will break a moratorium on hunting the famed humpback whale for the first time since 1963, the country’s Fisheries Agency said Saturday.

The ships, led by the 8,030-ton Nisshin Maru, will depart the southern port of Shimonoseki on Sunday morning, the agency said in a release.

The fleet has orders to kill up to 50 humpbacks - the first known large-scale hunt for the whales since a 1963 moratorium put them under international protection.

The mission will also take up to 935 Antarctic minke whales and up to 50 fin whales in their largest scientific whale hunt ever in the South Pacific, according to a report Japan submitted to the International Whaling Commission earlier this year. (Content Read …)

People are getting many more calories from the food they eat out than they think, especially when they think they are eating in some place healthy, says a Cornell University food and marketing professor. This kind of public misperception is great enough that health officials want to force food chains to put calories on menu boards. correspondent Lesley Stahl reports on the battle brewing between health advocates and the restaurant industry over calorie disclosure this Sunday, Nov. 18, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. “When people are eating in a restaurant that they think is healthy, people grossly underestimate how much they eat by about 50 percent,” says Brian Wansink, the Cornell professor. (Content Read …)

In their first joint investigation, and The Washington Post on Sunday, Nov. 18, will examine the government’s failure to notify defendants nationwide that they were convicted with the help of flawed forensic science or inaccurate testimony. correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen and the Post’s John Solomon report on scores of cases where defendants may not have received a fair trial because prosecution scientists overstated their conclusions or used faulty statistics. What’s more, none of those defendants has been informed that they may be entitled to have their cases reviewed. The results of their six-month investigation will appear Sunday, Nov. (Content Read …)

Doctors and rescuers were trying Friday to coax more than two dozen doomsday cult members into leaving their forest hideout near the Volga River, where they were awaiting the end of the world with the coming of spring.

The cult members have threatened to blow themselves up with about 100 gallons of stockpiled gasoline if authorities forced them out of what officials described as a cave or bunker near the village of Nikolskoye, about 400 miles southeast of Moscow, said regional spokesman Yevgeny Guseynov.

“Any forceful action is dangerous,” Guseynov said, but he added that doctors and rescuers were nearby and trying to persuade the cult members to leave. (Content Read …)

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, in Islamabad, spoke by phone with Benazir Bhutto on Friday in the highest-level U.S. contact with the Pakistani opposition leader since President Pervez Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, the State Department said.

“He wanted to hear from her how she viewed the political situation in Pakistan,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, as part of Negroponte’s hastily arranged checkup mission on the fast-changing developments involving a key U.S. ally.

Negroponte is expected to speak to Musharraf on Saturday, McCormack said. (Content Read …)