Muslim pilgrims circumambulate around the Kaaba in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Over 1.5 million Muslim pilgrims have arrived in Mecca for the annual hajj pilgrimage, Saudi authorities announced.
By Dec. 12, 1.4 million people from around the world had arrived in the desert kingdom, the official SPA news agency quoted the Haj Central Commission as saying.
Nearly 2.4 million people flocked to Saudi Arabia to perform the last haj, including more than 1.6 million from outside the kingdom.
The annual pilgrimage, which also attracts hundreds of thousands of Saudi faithful as well as foreigners resident in the kingdom, begins on Monday, the eighth day of the month of Dhi Al-Haja under the lunar calendar.
Saudi Arabia has announced that the high point of the haj, when pilgrims converge on Mount Arafat near Mecca, would take place on Tuesday, and that Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice marking the end of the pilgrimage, would be celebrated the next day.
Muslims slaughter sacrificial lambs to mark the feast of Eid Al-Adha.
All Muslims are required to make the haj to Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia, at least once in their lifetime if they have the means
to do so.

The British Army is losing the equivalent of nearly a battalion to illegal drug use every year, a research said.
Research from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defense think tank, showed the losses are greater than the total number of fatalities and serious injuries resulting from Britain’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, AFP reported.
An article in RUSI’s journal showed an increase in positive test results for illegal substances, through the defense ministry’s compulsory testing (CDT) program, from 517 cases in 2003 to 769 last year--almost a battalion’s worth.
The research provides more bad news for the British armed forces, after the current head of the army, Sir Richard Dannatt, warned of morale problems and serious overstretch among troops in a high-level report, according to excerpts published by a newspaper last month.
Researchers were also alarmed by a four-fold increase in the rate of soldiers testing positive for cocaine use. Positive rates of cocaine abuse rose from 1.4 per 1,000 in 2003 to 5.7 in the first semester of 2007.
Author Professor Sheila Bird, a senior scientist with the Medical Research Council, warned the increase could be the tip of the iceberg.
The researchers noted, however, that changes in the practices of the CDT program could have influenced the results, and said that the government had refused, on cost grounds, to release key data on this subject.
A Defense Ministry spokesman told AFP that about 90 percent of armed services personnel who test positive for illegal substances are dishonorably discharged, while the remaining 10 percent are usually from junior ranks.
“We’re confident that our drug policy, it works, and if you crack down on it hard, then the message gets out to other members of the forces that drugs won’t be tolerated,“ said the spokesman, on customary condition of anonymity.
He also dismissed any suggestion that increases in the total number of positive cases from 2003 to last year were linked to British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

About 20 percent of JapanÕs population were aged over 65 in 2005.

Crimes by older people in Japan jumped threefold this year compared with a decade ago, domestic media reported.
About 45,000 people over 65 were prosecuted between January and November, nearly half of them for shoplifting, the daily Tokyo Shimbun said, reported Reuters.
Assaults by older people rose to 1,700 from just 100 in the same period a decade ago, it quoted the National Police Agency as saying.
“Crimes by elderly people are increasing ... faster than the population is ageing,“ said Osamu Nasu of the Police Policy Research Center at the National Police Academy.
An increase in the number of isolated older people who do not socialize may be contributing to the rise in crimes, he said.
Japan’s population is ageing faster than in any other country, according to a government report in June.
About 20 percent of the population were over the age 65 in 2005, and the proportion is expected to double by mid-century, it said.

Indians who neglect ageing parents could be jailed under a new law passed by parliament amid growing elderly mistreatment in a country long known for revering the old.
Elderly people are increasingly being regarded in India as a burden as nuclear families become the norm against the backdrop of rapid economic development that is fast breaking down traditions, AFP said.
“With the joint family system withering away, the elderly are being abandoned,“ Meira Kumar, social justice minister in the Congress party-led government, told parliament.
The legislation provides for a three months’ jail term if children do not look after old parents, Kumar said, adding, “The penal provision is meant to act as a deterrent.“
India is a young country with a massive 51 percent of its 1.1 billion population younger than 25, and two-thirds below the age of 35.
But the number of elderly people is also growing with 113 million Indians expected to be older than 60 by 2016, up from 81 million now.
That figure is seen swelling to 179 million by 2026. There are frequent reports in the Indian media of the elderly being abandoned or mistreated by their grown-up offspring. The legislation stated “that old age has become a major social challenge and there is need to give more attention to care and protection of older persons“.
The new law, which provides for the setting up of many tribunals to provide speedy help to the old in distress, contains no room for appeal.
“This has been done deliberately as they (the children) have a lot of resources which the old people do not have,“ Kumar said.
The legislation also provides for the state to set up old age homes that the minister said should be the “last resort for the poor and the childless“.
The bill applies to adult children with parents over the age of 60.

Freeganism, which carries the slogan "life beyond capitalism," is a lifestyle that relies on sharing, recycling and salvaging.

Just a few blocks from Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, bustling with Christmas shoppers, another group of New Yorkers are out getting what they need with one big difference--by not spending any money.
For the city’s “Freegans“, finding bell peppers, apples and bagels in the bags of trash that litter the city’s sidewalks is a way of life, AFP reported.
It is a winter evening in Manhattan’s Midtown business district and a group of the anti-consumer activists meet up outside a luxury grocery store, timing their run for after the store closes but before the garbage trucks arrive.
They work fast, rummaging through bags and finding a wide array of food: strawberries, sausages, bananas, yogurts, fruit juice and carrots--on this run, bags and bags of carrots.
After a few moments of frantic foraging, they tie the bags back up and lay out an impressive display of goods that they offer to passers-by.
“One strawberry with a little bit of mold, one out of date yogurt, and they throw everything in the garbage,“ says one of the urban foragers, Christian Gutierrez, 34, who lives in a squat in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighborhood.
He wears a Burberry raincoat he’s proud to say he found in the trash, as well as shoes that didn’t even need reheeling.
Freeganism, which carries the slogan “life beyond capitalism,“ is a lifestyle that relies on sharing, recycling and salvaging.
The group work by what they call “urban foraging“ and uphold the right to free lodging and voluntary joblessness--because, as the group says in its literature, “man spends all his life working to pay bills and consume.“
Gutierrez, who doesn’t have a conventional job by choice, runs a mobile workshop making bicycles out of spare parts.
Cindy Rosin, 31, who teaches art in one of the city’s primary schools, says the group’s activities may seem odd to some people, but only because they have got used to the waste inherent in modern societies.
“It’s difficult to believe that what’s in the garbage is not necessarily garbage“, she said.
She added, “There are lots of anti-consumerism groups in America“, citing the example of one group named “compact,“ whose members try not to spend any money for a year, she explains, while heading to the next stop outside a bakery.
Passers-by often seem perplexed by what the Freegans are doing on their “trash tours,“ but the group’s members don’t take any notice and take home most of what they find.

A fisherman in IranÕs Bandar Anzali, Gilan province, lays fishing net in the sea.

Health leaders from the Asia-Pacific met on Dec. 13 to discuss ways to encourage the use of vaccines against pneumococcal diseases which are a major killer in the region, organizers said.
Most regional countries, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, have been slow in adopting the vaccines in their immunization programs, they said, reported AFP.
“Here in the Asia-Pacific region, we still have a long way to go in addressing pneumococcal disease,“ said Luis Jodar, deputy director general of the Seoul-based International Vaccine Institute.
A 2006 report by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN children’s fund UNICEF report said more than half of all pneumonia cases worldwide occur in the Asia-Pacific.

China is making progress fighting human trafficking, especially from southeast Asian nations, but needs greater regional cooperation and tougher action, a senior official said.
China has resorted to harsh punishments, including the death penalty, to deter human trafficking. The UN Children’s Fund says 250,000 Chinese women and children fell victim to trafficking in 2003, Reuters reported.
The government had stepped up publicity campaigns and opened border liaison offices as well as centers for people rescued from trafficking, said Du Hangwei, head of the Ministry of Public Security’s Criminal Investigation Department.
“China has made notable achievements through further enhanced cooperation with countries in the Mekong region, international organizations and non-governmental organizations, and large-scale prevention and combat of trafficking as well as positive assistance for victims,“ he told a conference in Beijing.
Transfer centers for repatriation have been opened in the southern region of Guangxi, which borders Vietnam, and Yunnan, which shares a long border with Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, he added in a speech.
There has been a rise in trafficking cases involving Myanmar women in China in particular in recent years.
The women are mostly smuggled through the porous border into the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan and then taken to central and north China, where poverty and a skewed sex ratio means many farmers cannot find wives.
Late last year, China jailed six Myanmar nationals for selling 23 Myanmar girls to Chinese peasants as wives.