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Investors who spent the week bidding stocks higher reversed course Friday after the latest labor statistic Despite Friday's losses, the Dow industrials rose 0.9% for the week, its fifth-consecutive weekly gain, and the Nasdaq gained 2.6%. Nonfarm payrolls dropped 93,000 last month, the steepest in five months, after falling a revised 49,000 in July, the Labor Department said early Friday. The unemployment rate edged down to 6.1%. Economists had predicted an increase of 12,000 in nonfarm payrolls and expected the unemployment rate to remain unchanged at 6.2%. Economists weren't impressed. "The jobs report is just awful," said Bill Cheney, chief...

TORONTO (CP) -- The city's SARS outbreak took a distressing turn Friday with news that a medical resident was likely coming down with SARS when he was present for the delivery of a set of twins at a downtown hospital during a full day's work earlier this week. The health-care worker was believed to be infected May 23 at North York General Hospital and didn't show with symptoms until two days past the 10-day incubation period, said Dr. Donald Low, a key member of the city's SARS containment team. He was showing no symptoms when he assisted in the delivery...

<p>Back in 1984, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announced a vaccine for AIDS "will be ready for testing within two years." Today there's no AIDS vaccine approval in sight. Now with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) it's the same silliness. But the new tools of biotechnology do bring hope of much faster vaccine development.</p>

National Taiwan University Hospital yesterday reported the first case of a suspected severe acute respiratory syndrome patient who had recovered and checked out of the hospital but was readmitted with symptoms similar to those of SARS. Hospital officials reported that the middle-aged women visited the hospital on April 23 after developing a fever, and was listed as a suspected SARS case. She checked out May 12, but developed a fever again May 19, and her lungs showed changes. The officials believed that she was contagious between the first time she checked out and her relapse. Chang Shan-chun, director of contagious...

Being fever-free for more than 72 hours or 3 days is what doctors may now have to look out for in their patients. Parkway Shenton that manages the clinic which treated the latest SARS case, says this experience shows that more symptons have to be looked at when sifting out SARS cases. Between 5 May to 11 May, the latest SARS patient Lee Chong Kian saw the doctor at this clinic opposite Bukit Gombak MRT Station five times. From his first visit to his third visit, his temperature was going down and he was responding to antibiotics. But the 39-year-old...

A Chinese newspaper reports that Chinese experts claim discovery of SARS antibodies that may one day help protect people against the disease. The China Daily quotes Li Gang, a medical researcher specializing infectious disease as saying that after three months of research his team has detected two kinds of antibodies - IgG and IgM - in SARS patients. Mr. Li says IgG, or Immunoglobulin G, is what all SARS patients have during recuperation and on recovery. Mr. Li says people who have recovered from the disease should be traced to see they still have the antibody. He predicted that vaccines...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An experimental drug made by Pfizer to treat the common cold may provide a starting point for finding a treatment for SARS, researchers in Germany said on Tuesday. The compound, known only by its laboratory name AG7088, is not likely to itself be a treatment for severe acute respiratory syndrome, said Rolf Hilgenfeld of the University of Luebeck in Germany, who led the study. "There are some minor clashes between the inhibitor AG7088 and the structure of SARS coronavirus main protease; therefore, this compound, AG7088, is unlikely to be a drug active against coronavirus infections," Hilgenfeld said...

LOS ANGELES, May 9, 2003 -- Chances that a proposed drug for use against SARS will prove effective against the deadly pneumonia epidemic were sharply improved by findings that only insignificant mutations are occurring in the cornoavirus identified as its cause, according to a respected British medical journal, making it a stable target for rapidly-produced "antisense" drugs that prime the immune system to prepare it for the SARS virus and then attack it when the victim is infected. Corvallis, Ore.-based AVI BioPharma CEO Dennis Burger told Congress in sworn testimony May 7 that he believes a compound newly created by...

WASHINGTON - Federal researchers are beginning work toward a vaccine that could eventually help control the mystery illness that has spread from Asia to North America and killed at least 85 people The research is just getting under way at the National Institutes of Health, but officials said Friday they are already trying to interest industry in producing a vaccine based on the results. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta say they are 90 percent sure the mystery illness, dubbed severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is a new form of the coronavirus, a cause...

International health experts are hunting for the virus that causes SARS, the flu-like disease that has killed 61 people worldwide and infected at least one in Germany. The first case of the flu-like disease Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was confirmed in Germany on Tuesday. A 72-year-old man who recently traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam and Singapore was diagnosed as having the illness by the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. [Clinic in Hemer near Iserlohn in North-rhine Westphalia. ] The man is being treated at a clinic in the town of Hemer in southwestern Germany (photo). He is...

THE FOLLOWING IS A TELEPHONE INTERVIEW WITH DR. AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, USAMA BIN LADIN'S RIGHT-HAND MAN AND LEADER OF EGYPT'S JIHAD ORGANIZATION, BY FARRAJ ISMA'IL FROM CHAMAN ON THE AFGHAN BORDER; DATE NOT GIVEN. THERE ARE CONFLICTING REPORTS ABOUT THE FATE OF DR. AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, USAMA BIN LADIN'S RIGHT-HAND MAN AND LEADER OF THE EGYPTIAN JIHAD ORGANIZATION. IT IS KNOWN THAT AL-ZAWAHIRI HAS AVOIDED DIRECT MEDIA APPEARANCES EVER SINCE HIS LAUNCH OF THE JIHAD CASES IN EGYPT AND HIS ASSOCIATION WITH BIN LADIN, ESPECIALLY AFTER THE 11 SEPTEMBER EVENTS. DESPITE THE CONFLICTING REPORTS THAT HE WAS INJURED, AL-ZAWAHIRI STAYED AWAY ...

The Egyptian newspaper, Al-Sha'ab, the mouthpiece of the Egyptian Islamist Al-Amal (Labor) party, was closed last year by Egyptian authorities following severe student riots that were prompted by an article published in the paper. After a few months, Al-Sha'ab was permitted to resume publication, but only on the Internet. In the cover story for the September 23, 2001 issue, which was dedicated to the attacks on N.Y. and D.C., Dr. Muhammad Abbas, who prompted last year's riots, threatened the U.S. with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and with attacks against Americans working in the Middle East. Following are excerpts ...

War With China? US Shifting Massive War Material To Asia Listen for howls from America's European allies and its non-ally communist China. The Army will be relocating massive war materiel - and strategic emphasis - to Asia. &nbsp; This latest development underscores that the Bush-Cheney administration definitely regards the People's Republic of China as a major potential military threat to the United States. &nbsp; It sets the stage for a strong protest from Beijing that the United States is embarked in the Pacific on warlike policies, directed at China. &nbsp; And it is certain to arouse resentment and criticism ...

The Final War: Should the two nations descend to nuclear blows, a shower of warheads would rain down on China, particularly on missile sites that target Taiwan Taiwan considerations will play a key role in a strategic review of US nuclear war options by the George W. Bush administration, which is expected to target hundreds of Chinese sites for nuclear attack in case of war, a leading US nuclear war expert says. The Chinese sites will be contained in a war plan the administration is scheduled to present to Congress in July after a thorough strategic review. The review ...

The Chinese People's Liberation Army has designated the Nanjing military district as the main battle theater for any struggle against Taiwan, Chinese press reported earlier this month, even as the PLA improves its military facilities in the Spratly Islands. According to the Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao newspaper, dated July 22, PLA military officials have begun preparing the Nanjing district as the main theater of battle in a war with Taiwan and foreign interventionists. During a forum of Communist Party committee secretaries, Fang Zuqi, political commissar for the Nanjing Military Region emphasized that for the army, "the most realistic ...

The U.S. State Department on Thursday said it was opposed to the "one China" condition set by Beijing as terms for Taiwan's entry into the World Trade Organization, Taiwan's Central News Agency said. A State Department official, who was not named in the report, said the agency believed that the WTO working party protocol negotiations -- currently being held in Geneva, at the WTO headquarters -- was "not an appropriate forum to address political issues" concerning China's policy demand. "Let me reiterate that we support the admission to the WTO of both China and Taiwan as soon as possible," ...

Analysts and lawmakers critical of the Clinton administration's China policies blasted the White House Wednesday for ignoring what they view as an emerging Chinese military threat in deference of economic relations. During a hearing, members of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee expressed concern over Beijing's capacity to challenge Washington's strategy in the region. "The administration appears to take a more forgiving view of China's military potential -- and the challenges it poses to U.S. security interests, than I believe is warranted," said committee Chairman Floyd Spence, R-S.C. Spence accused the administration of downplaying the Chinese threat in ...

MIDDLE EAST | Former UNSCOM executive director Richard Butler said yesterday that Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz had told him his country has biological weapons "to deal with the 'Zionist entity,'" according to a report Tuesday in the Jerusalem Post. Butler said he believes Aziz's statement, made during Butler's tenure as a UN-mandated Iraqi disarmament official during a meeting, demonstrates "genocidal character." Speaking at a lecture in Jerusalem, the paper said, Butler claimed that two years after Baghdad expelled UN weapons inspectors, Saddam Hussein is back to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. He said only a united UN ...

..so why doesn't anybody care? INTERSECTION of the Fourth of July weekend and the release of Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" provided a perfect opportunity to reflect on the way America's heritage is under continuous assault by the determined legions of the political left. This attack has been mounted by an intellectual class based in the media and in America's politically correct educational institutions, whose inspiration is a set of discredited 19th-century dogmas masquerading as "progressive" nostrums. Not even the collapse of communism has been able to reconcile their alienated psyches to the American cause. Elsewhere around the world, the patria ...

Too many private businessmen are joining the Communist Party, an article in the party's monthly ideological magazine, Zhongliu, has warned. In some coastal areas, half of the new members in small towns and rural districts were private business owners, it complained. By July 1998, Qinghui county outside Shanghai had 158 capitalists in the local party. Of the county's 52 party cells, 36 were run by private businessmen. In three cities in Jiangsu province, 40 per cent of private business owners, 858 people, had applied to join the local branch. "If we do not take stern measures there will be ...