World Digest
Bird flu, regular influenza called risky combination

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However, a senior official at the U.N. agency said he saw no need for the kind of travel warnings WHO issued during last year's SARS epidemic.

Bird flu has swept through Cambodia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, infecting millions of chickens. In Vietnam, the virus has killed at least five people. Two boys are sick with the disease in Thailand, where an elderly man who died yesterday is also a suspected victim.

Scientists think people get the disease through contact with sick birds. So far, there has been no evidence of person-to-person transmission.

Scrambling to contain the outbreak, governments have started mass culls of chickens.

Iranian reformers reject candidates' reinstatement

TEHRAN, Iran — Hard-liners reinstated dozens more reformist candidates who were banned from next month's parliamentary election, but reformers yesterday rejected the moves as cosmetic.

At least 70 civil servants, including more than a dozen deputy ministers, threatened to resign unless the more than 3,000 disqualified contenders are reinstated.

Reformers believe the conservatives are trying to skewer the Feb. 20 elections in their favor. Hard-liners claim those who were disqualified failed to meet the legal criteria for being members of parliament.

Eighteen percent of Britons don't want a Jewish leader, poll says

LONDON — Eighteen percent of Britons do not want a Jewish prime minister, while 15 percent believe the scale of the Holocaust has been exaggerated, according to a poll published yesterday.

The ICM survey for the Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper, comes as Jewish groups warn of rising anti-Semitism in Europe. The European Union is convening a conference on the issue.

Michael Howard, leader of Britain's main opposition Conservative Party, is Jewish and stands to become prime minister if the party wins the next national election.

The ICM polling company interviewed 1,007 adults. No margin of error was given, but on such samples it is usually about 3 percentage points.

Van Gogh letter addresses earlier tragedy in family

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — A recently discovered letter by Vincent van Gogh, on display for the first time, speaks his father's grief over the loss of his first child — a boy also named Vincent who was stillborn a year before van Gogh's birth.

The letter, the first authenticated one by van Gogh to surface since 1990, is the only known reference by the artist to the family tragedy, said Leo Jansen, a researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, which added the letter to its exhibition Thursday.

The letter was written in 1877. Van Gogh, suffering from depression, killed himself in 1890.

Seventeen crew members missing after freighter goes down

ATHENS — A freighter sank in rough seas in the Mediterranean 120 miles west of Crete early yesterday. Two crew members were rescued, but 17 remained missing.

The Greek-owned Kephi, sailing under a Comoros flag with 8,000 tons of cement, sent out a distress signal at 2:30 a.m. after taking in water.

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