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ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's health ministry said on Friday the World Health Organisation (WHO) had confirmed that three children who died in the east of the country had contracted the bird flu virus. "The test results for the three came back positive...They have been confirmed by the WHO laboratory," Necdet Unuvar, a senior health ministry official, told a televised news conference.

By Mustafa Yukselbaba DOGUBAYAZIT, Turkey (Reuters) - A third child from the same family in eastern Turkey died from bird flu on Friday as doctors treated more than 20 other people, mostly youngsters, suspected of having the deadly virus. Doctors said some of the victims had been playing with the severed heads of infected birds. The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed 74 people in east Asia and has now spread to the fringes of Europe. The latest child to die was Hulya Kocyigit, 11, the sister of M ...

By Michael Holden LONDON (Reuters) - Police said on Friday they had jailed 34 people involved with a mainly Colombian gang who ran the biggest cocaine and money-laundering operation ever to be uncovered in the country. The network was so substantial that the gang supplied drugs to every major UK city, and after their arrest the price of cocaine on the street street rose by 50 percent. Police sa ...

By Madeline Thomas LONDON (Reuters) - Women have spent more than 7 billion pounds buying clothes, shoes and accessories they will never wear, according to a survey on Friday. Women have 14 items of clothing, on average, lurking in the back of their wardrobes that they have not worn in the last year, the survey by home insurer Churchill found. Each unwanted item cost an average 21.82 pounds, which meant the country's 24 million women spent 7.3 billion pounds last year on clothes they did not w ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Noddy, one of the country's best-loved children's characters, has a new friend -- Whizz the Robot, on a mission to teach foreign languages. Whizz is the first new character to appear in the Enid Blyton cartoon in nearly 15 years. Whizzing around on his red and yellow skates, he will introduce pre-school children to different languages as co-presenter of "Say It With Noddy", a  ...

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Barry Cowsill, a member of the popular 1960s singing family The Cowsills, was found dead on a wharf nearly four months after he disappeared when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city. He was 51. Cowsill's body, recovered December 28 from the Chartres Street Wharf, was identified with dental records Tuesday, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, head of the state hurricane morgue in Carville. The coroner had not determined the cause of death but believed it was related to the de ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Police said they had arrested a man on Friday in Sheffield under anti-terrorism laws. The 20-year-old was held by detectives on suspicion of having "items likely to be of use to a terrorist". Police said the inquiry was linked to possible activities in southeast Asia and had no connection to the London bomb attacks last July. The man has been taken to a police station in Sout ...

By Michael Holden LONDON (Reuters) - It's not the suicide bomb attack on John Tulloch's train six months ago that angers the professor the most. It's the politicians and media who he says have exploited the July 7 attacks on London. Tulloch was sitting opposite Mohammed Sidique Khan who detonated a backpack filled with explosives on a Circle Line train near Edgware Road station. Amazingly he survived despite his proximity to Khan -- the 30-year-old suspected leader of the four-man gang that b ...

By Andrew Gray LONDON (Reuters) - Pressure mounted on Charles Kennedy on Friday to quit as Liberal Democrat leader after his admission of a drink problem, with one senior party figure calling him a "dead man walking". Chris Davies, the party's leader in the European Parliament, urged Kennedy to ditch his plans to call a leadership vote and stand for re-election which he announced in a dramatic personal statement on Thursday about his drinking. And a survey in the Evening Standard found 16 of  ...

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- Jose Padilla, the terror suspect dubbed an "enemy combatant" and held without charges for more than three years, was flown to Miami on Thursday and appeared briefly before a federal magistrate. More than a dozen federal marshals and court security officers lined the courtroom as Padilla was brought in wearing handcuffs, leg shackles and an orange jumpsuit. The hearing before U.S. magistrate Barry L. Garber lasted about five minutes, and Padilla, 35, will return to court ...